 If you lived through the 1990s like I did, that sound likely fills you with a mix of nostalgia and frustration. From early messaging boards to modern tools like FaceTime and Skype, mediated communication has had a profound impact on our day-to-day lives. In this lecture, I'm going to explain what communication studies is and dive into the history and foundations of computer mediated communication. Let's start by defining communication. For those of us who study and teach communication, we are often met with a lot of confusion about what it is we do. I've had friends and students confuse the field with journalism, broadcasting, and even computer science. Part of this confusion is somewhat unavoidable because oftentimes the source of the communication we study comes from the aforementioned field. Further complicate things, the term communication, is one of those words that has a multitude of different definitions. That said, these definitions can be useful in providing insight into different facets of the way human beings connect with each other. One of the earliest definitions came out of Miller's 1966 work which described communication as any action or actions that a person consciously uses to affect another's behaviors. That's a pretty simple, useful way to think of the concept, but it is somewhat abstract. I find it more useful to start with the more specific question related to the discipline, what is communication studies? Bruce Smith, Harold Laswell, and Ralph D. Casey provided a good and simple answer to the question. They state that communication studies is an academic field whose primary focus is who says what through what channels of communication, to whom, and what will be the results. Even though this definition is over 70 years old, it still does a nice job at describing the focus of communication scholars and professionals. As professors and students of communication, we extensively examine the various forms and outcomes of human communication. The National Communication Association, our national organization, states that communication studies focuses on how people use messages to generate meanings within and across various contexts, cultures, channels, and the media. The discipline promotes the effective and ethical practice of human communication. They go on to say, communication is a diverse discipline which includes inquiry by social scientists, humanists, and critical and cultural scholars. Now that you have an idea what communication studies is, let's talk briefly about how communication functions as a process. Simply speaking, there are two main ways communication is modeled, the linear model and the transactional model. Let's examine these models of communication to help you further understand the communication process. Shannon Weaver proposed a mathematical model of communication, often called the linear model, in 1949. This model suggests that communication is simply the transmission of a message from one source to another. Think about watching some YouTube videos as an example of this. You act as the receiver when you watch videos, receiving messages from the source. We can better understand this by breaking down each part of the model. The linear model of communication is a model that suggests communication moves only in one direction. The sender encodes a message and then uses a certain channel, verbal or nonverbal communication, to send it to a receiver who then decodes, interprets, the original message. Noise is anything that interferes with or changes the original encoded message. The linear model is useful in demonstrating the basic communicative idea that us humans have thoughts in our heads that we package in language and send out across various medians. It is, however, not without some major criticisms. Both amongst them is that the linear model suggests that communication only occurs in one direction. It also doesn't show how context or personal experiences go to impact the communicative exchanges. Television serves as a good example of the linear model. Have you ever talked back to your television while you were watching it? Maybe you were watching a sporting event or a dramatic show and you talked to the people on the TV. Did they respond to you? I'm fairly certain they did not. Technologies like television work in one direction. No matter how much you talk to the characters on your favorite TV show, they will not respond to you. Now, apply this idea to the communication in your relationships. It seems ridiculous to think that this is how we would communicate with each other on a regular basis. This example shows the limits of the linear model for understanding communication, particularly human-to-human communication. Given the limitations of the linear model, Dean Barnland adapted it to more fully represent what occurs in most human communication exchanges. The transactional model demonstrates that communication participants act as senders and receivers simultaneously, creating reality through their interactions. Communication is not a simple one-way transmission of a message. The personal filters and experiences of the participants impact each communication exchange. The transactional model demonstrates that we are simultaneously senders and receivers and that noise and personal filters always influence the outcome of every communication exchange. The transactional model of communication adds to the linear model by suggesting that both parties in a communication exchange act as both sender and receiver simultaneously, encoding and decoding messages to and from each other at the same time. Now, while these models are overly simplistic representations of the communication process, they illustrate some of the complexities of defining and studying communication. Going back to Smith Lastwell and Casey, as communication scholars, we may choose to focus on one or all of the combination of the following. Receivers of communication, receivers of communication, channels of communication, messages, noise, context, and the outcome of communication. You see, studying communication is simultaneously detail-oriented, looking at small parts of human communication, and far-reaching, examining a broad range of communication exchanges. Now that we have a more complex understanding of what communication is, let's plug in the mediated component of communication. I apologize, my puns are only going to get worse. Computer-mediated communication, or CMC for short, really came into existence during the period between World War II where computers were used to send coded information to sometime in the 1960s when military research organizations prototyped the first email messages. Regardless of when you set the start date on these technologies, the reality is the method of communication is fairly new when compared to the previous major communicative breakthrough of pencil and paper. In the 1970s, programmers at the University of Illinois created the first chat technology, a program called Tachomatic, and the 1980s saw the rise of the personal computer revolution. But tonight, really for the second time ever, we'd like to let Macintosh speak for itself. Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag. The 90s gave us the internet and gave rise to a whole new level of communicative access. Tonight, the information superhighway and one of its main thoroughfares, an online network called Internet. Arguably, the early internet was pretty simple, but there was a growing amount of technologies that let people connect, from AOL chat rooms to instant messengers, but the real change of the 90s was the number of people who used the internet. Research published by Our World in Data shows that the number of internet users worldwide has skyrocketed since the birth of the worldwide web on 20th of December 1990, when the world's first website went live at the physics lab CERN in Switzerland. As you can see from this chart, the number of internet users increased to 44 million in 1995 and 413 million in the year 2000. The early 2000s saw continuous growth, and with that growth, a reimagining of the worldwide web into Web 2.0. Web 2.0 refers to the worldwide web websites that emphasize user-generated content, usability, participatory culture, and interoperability for end users. The term was invented by technology author and consultant Darcy Denuse in 1999 and was popularized seven years later by Tim O'Reilly and Del Dourgley at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in late 2004. With this massive growth of access and emphasis on user-created content, came more communication between users and really precipitated the need for folks to study it. This gave rise to the field of computer-mediated communication. The term computer-mediated communication most simply refers to any communication achieved through or with the help of a computer or a modern equivalent like a smartphone. If you think back to that overly simplistic linear model of communication, the variable here is the channel. In the case of mediated communication, the channel becomes any type of computer-based technology. Wather and Bergen's 1992 definition still works pretty good to sum this up. Computer-mediated communication is no longer a novelty, but a communication channel through which much of our business and social interaction takes place, and this transformation is expected to continue. As we move forward, the need to study and gain insight into mediated communication becomes an important aspect to understanding the ways our communication is evolving. The rise of mobile technology and smartphones means more and more of our day-to-day interactions are aided, filtered through, and completely facilitated by computer-mediated communication. Today we talked about the basics of communication studies, we did a whirlwind tour of the rise of mediated communication technologies, and set up a basic framework to describe what mediated communication is. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. This video series is written and produced by me, Ryan Guy, with the help of a wide range of scholarly research and open educational resources. For more information on the references and materials used, go ahead and see the description page on YouTube. This video is published under a Creative Commons license. Please feel free to share, use, and remix its content.