ARTICLE 2 - The Advantages and Disadvantages of Computer Mediated Communication

BLOGGING TASK 2

After watching the video, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of CMC based on Walther's SIP:

Is Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) GOOD or BAD?

After watching Season 6 Episode 16 of Modern Family titled ‘Connection Lost’, the TMP team were amazed and impressed by how much technology; especially CMC has become a part of our everyday lives!

In this article, we will discuss about the advantages and disadvantages of CMC which was used as means of daily communication by the Dunphy family.

Joseph Walther developed a theory known as Social Information Processing (SIP). SIP as compared to previous theories on CMC (as discussed in Entry 1), argued that CMC can build intimacy and has the same depth as F2F communication even for cross-cultural communication, it’s only weakness is a slower rate of transfer (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999).

SIP comprises of 3 characteristics: Selective self-presentation, Over-attribution of similarity, and Communicating on your time.

The advantages

SAVE TIME, ENERGY AND MONEY

            The obvious and the most crucial important of having the technologies in our daily life is its able to save more energy, time and sometime even money. It’s also will increase the means of production of certain people who belong in business field for instance. In modern family video, the reason why we are saying that the technologies able to conserve more energy, time and sometime even money because we can clearly saw that the mother does not rushing to buy a new ticket to find about her missing daughter. But, she remain calm at the airport and using the usefulness of the technologies to find her daughter to the fullest. For instance, she just need internet connection some of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) such as Facebook, Whatsapp and the most famous search engines such as google to find about her daughter locations, who is with her and what are she doing at the current moment. So, in that case, her mother able to save more of her energy and use the remaining 4 hours of her delay free time of departure to find about her daughter with ease and more productive. Other than that, why we are saying that sometime technologies able to save more money is because, we can clearly saw that, her mother does not rush in making the decision about to buy a new ticket immediately even though her family might be in seriously in danger situations. For that matter, people with the higher class in the society able to use the advantages of technologies the fullest rather than people in the working class. One of the most obvious reason is because of money. People with more money able to own the most productive technologies product and use it the fullest. That’s why this world is all about M O N E Y! And, we are not really into that kind of system created by the C A P I T A L I S M.  Nowadays, the world is more about C O M P E T I T I O N rather than COOPERATION. That’s all, have a nice day everyone!

COMMUNICATING ON YOUR TIME

            This phase showed an obvious depiction. CMC users are allowed to communicate anytime they feel suitable or comfortable. There are 2 types of online communication which are asynchronous communication and synchronous communication (Cordova, Keller, Menthe, & Rhodes, 2013).We live in an era of real-time – we expect to find information when we want it, answers when we need them and access to find both of these on our own. Self-service, social media, live chat, video conferencing and unified communications and collaboration are all possible today because of developments in real-time communications. Real-time communication is a means of sharing information and interacting with people through network connections just as if they were face-to-face. Digging into the technicalities a little deeper, it’s any live (real-time) telecommunications that doesn’t have transmission delays – it’s usually a peer-to-peer connection with minimal latency, and data from a real-time communications application is sent in a direct path between the source and destination. Beside, we can also communicate with our friends and family in a real time. For instance, In airport, it showed the time that Clair Dunphy use to video called her family even herself at oversea. The different times was not so far, but it indicated that even you are far away from home, you still can use technology to talk and communicating with each other. It also save time and money.

IMPROVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

CMC is any form of communication between two or more individual people who interact and/or influence each other via separate computers through the Internet or a network connection with using social software. Through CMC, communication can happen at any time and anywhere with no face-to-face communication. So CMC can be said to be unlimited in terms of time and place. Two people who want to communicate are no longer needed to make meetings or face to face because with the latest technologies of increasingly popular social media such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Wechat, Twitter, Telegram and much more facilitate the communication and delivery of information. An excellent example of organizational communication is between employers and workers. When employers work outside the area, employers will be away from their employees. However, when an employer wants to know their workers' situation, employers can easily get their employees info via Whatsapp or Facebook. Employers can easily disseminate information and direction through the social media. In addition, communication between employees is also easier if they can communicate via Whatsapp group. In conclusion, CMC is shown to improve the organizational communication.

The disadvantages

           

DETERIORATING LANGUAGE

Language is something irreplaceable and valuable heritage that we inherit from our ancestors where it becomes a part of symbols in our culture. It has meaningful value for us to appreciate and conserve the heritage of our nation's heritage. Nowadays, people are more comfortable to make social interaction with their friends, family and other where the technology itself has been as their medium to communicate with each other. In social media, sometimes people more likely not to concerned with the way they wrote or talked especially when they are using the social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Moreover, the advanced of technology in computer-mediated communication (CMC) has given people more freedom to share their thought on certain sensitive issues and spread it with their own opinions where they are preferable to use abusive words. For example, many of social media users especially the enormous users have criticized and condemned the owner of the Neelofa Hijab which is Miss Neelofa for launching her hijab collection at the inappropriate place with really harsh and bad words. The enormous users more likely to write harsh words to condemn anyone whose they think can bring negative influences especially an artists and politicians. According to Walther as cited by Griffin (2012), through CMC, people can write about their thought, accomplishments without fear of contradiction from their physical appearance where no one could know his or her darkside on CMC.

It really not showing our culture where we as Malaysian is famous for its high politeness. Even in our religion does not encourage its believers to be violent and to speak with others to be violent and to speak with others. It also could give the physical and emotional effects to the persons who have been scorned by the media social users. They also might think that they can make impressions from what they have done in their social media space. What we said and wrote about certain issues really reflect yourself.

SELECTIVE SELF-PRESENTATION

As we know, most of WeChat users are the young students where they use it to express themselves on social media. When they are using the WeChat application, they simply can find a stranger in their WeChat account trough ‘looking people nearby’ or ‘shake’ where they can easily add outsider people to be their friends. Many WeChat users especially the Z Generation like to use modern language which is a language that has mixed up and abbreviated words in the real language. This has led to the modernization of language that has become a new identity for today's social media users. For example, there are WeChat users that always used the mixed up and abbreviated words where it has make other people hard to read and understand about it Even though they know what they wrote was really wrong but they feel it as a cute thing.  . People will call this type group of people as a “WeChat user” where it has become a part of self-representation for this groups of people.

 It is been a fact where most of the Z generation more likely to have an individualistic behavior that differs from the normal norms. According to Edmunds and Turner, as cited by Napoli 2014, they stated that media has played vital roles in shape the identity of people where media as agents and products that work together with other social forces in reconstructing culture, changing the language, environment, and society around the social agents.

MISCOMMUNICATION

In addition, misunderstandings in communication often occur because the communication is a one-way. For example, it usually happens when the presenter and receiver interpret the same words in different ways. Other causes that may cause misunderstandings in communication are assumed to be true. As in the video, the mother overly believes in the unhealthy news, believing that her daughter is getting married.

LACK OF PRIVACY

            Nowadays, society nearly does everything on computer, smartphone or tablet and online leaves traces. That make it relatively easy to see what we or other people doing to assume it everything we do in online could be shared with other. What we can see when we use the Facebook, there always post the warning about their Messenger app privacy term, which give the Facebook have the right to use the microphone and camera without warning. In reality, many apps ask for permission to access our camera and phone. In Facebook, we ever wonder how Facebook can suggest to us “People You May Know” this is because Facebook using our contact list to match with our phone number. Facebook also tell us when our friend nearby us using “Nearby Friends”, this mean our phone contain a detailed record everywhere we have been. Facebook not only invader our privacy when it comes to location tracking. Facebook have almost same with Google Maps. For example in Modern Family series when Claire hacks Haley’s I Cloud account to track the GPS on her phone. Claire searcher the address on Google Map which shows up on a street that in Las Vegas, next to a small wedding chapel.

            Other than that, photo sharing sites can be more source of unplanned privacy issue. Society nowadays like to post their picture without realise, they picture may be leak or being use by certain people for something bad. Due to this we must watch out what we sync before it too late. For student we always use Google Chrome to do our assignment but be careful because Google can read our conversation even we default it. Free webmail sites also one app that can hack our personal data with show up ads at our Google Gmail better do not open that because it can our information like what Facebook did. When our information of personal data became leak everything we have we will lose it like our identity, credit card, driver licenses even people around the world can use our picture. In Modern Family series we can see how Claire use to pretend to be guy to add her daughter Facebook activity. She try to check her daughter Haley account Facebook and see his daughter do not accepted her friend request. Claire even uses other people picture. That why we need to alert nowadays every website is lack of privacy and easy to be hack. Whatever transaction we do online it could be public. Our credit card or personal data could be stolen, password can be hack. Everything we do in this IT world now more dangerous than living in real life. In conclusion to keep our data privacy is always alert to change our password time to time, keep a close eye on sync and privacy setting for apps we use in our phone. That why we need to keep this word in our mind to make we care our privacy that is “IT maybe intelligence but we as human must more intelligence because we are the one who create them.”

New Identity in Media

            According to (Daniel Miller et al, 2016), social media is defined as the colonization of space between traditional broadcasting and communication of personal dyadik, providing people with the scale size of the group and the degree of privacy that we call socialization scale.  Meanwhile, (Siti Ezaleila Mustafa & Azizah Hamzah, 2010) states that the media is a powerful tool to communicate with one another. Moreover, with web 2.0 technologies, the use of internet has changed a lot so that Levinson (2009) said that as a new means of new media later in social media than classical media such as e-mail and websites. This media is not only to transmit, record and send a text but as a means to deliver media content and make it easier interaction between reader and writer. So with the advent of new media at present, have advantages and disadvantages in using it. What I can say, if we use social media properly, we can benefit from it, but if we use the wrong way, it will have a big impact on us and its surroundings.

As we shall discuss, big impact of social media on the negative side is the creator of a new identity, or we call it as a hacker to gather detailed information about our privacy. Referring to (Wible, 2003), while the Internet has revolutionized communications and commerce, it also creates the conditions for this type of crime can be done anonymously, from anywhere in the world, and with consequences that are unprecedented in scope. Computer crimes come in many forms, including online theft and fraud, vandalism, and political motivated activities. Other hackers just try to break the code, look for challenges, competition, and talk rights. Regardless of motivation, aggression has serious costs. On the offending site must install a security hole. Even something rude to disrupt the victim's online service while the violation is fixed. whether or not the offense is malicious, the company usually sources investigating the matter, often hiring private investigators that they did not suffer a loss of reputation. If other hackers are vulnerable to the site, unusual hack may be the foremost attack of the previous one. Finally, remembering the gravity of the victims can change their behavior, becoming information that is refused online. So in the opinion of research, it can be pointed out that hackers can create a new identity in social media to steal our personal information. Additionally, sometimes hackers can create fake social media as a platform to steal our personal information such as fake facebook accounts and become friends on the list. So, they will collect our information about our date of birth, our location and so on. With it they can do their job to hack our personal property such as bank account because they have our information. Therefore, in our daily lives, we need to be cautious of all strangers including our families because this crime can happen to everyone and can be done by anyone including our family as well.

References

Daniel Miller, E. C. (2016). Academic studies of social media. In E. C. Daniel Miller, How the World Changed Social Media (pp. 9-24). London: UCL Press.

Siti Ezaleila Mustafa, A. h. (2010). Media Sosial: Tinjauan Terhadap Laman Jaringan Sosial Dalam Talian Tempatan. Jurnal Pengajian Media Malaysia Jilid 12, No 2, 37-52.

Wible, B. (2003). A Site Where Hackers Are Welcome: Using Hack-In Contests to Shape Preferences andDeter Computer Crime. The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 112, No. 6, 1577-1623.