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CHAPTER 14
Theories of ComputerMediated Communication
and Interpersonal Relations
Joseph B. Walther
Computer-mediated communication (CMC)
systems, in a variety of forms, have
become integral to the initiation, development,
and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.
They are involved in the subtle shaping
of communication in almost every relational
context. We may observe or participate in the
conversations of huge numbers of social actors,
from the Twitter messages of experts we have
never met to one’s family’s blog and from messaging
a barely acquainted Facebook friend to
coordinating with one’s spouse through texting
about who will pick up the kids that day or saying
via e-mail that one is sorry about the fight
they had that morning. Individuals exploit the
features of these media to make their best impression
and attract attention or to ward off undesired
contacts (Tong & Walther, 2011a). We
continually form and re-form our impressions
and evaluations of others online, from deciding
whose recommendations to trust in discussion
boards (Van Der Heide, 2008) to evaluating the
friend who portrays himself online in a not quite
accurate way (DeAndrea & Walther, in press).
Although many people perceive that social media
messages are trivial and banal, so is the stuff by
which relationships are maintained (Duck, Rutt,
Hurst, & Strejc, 1991; Tong & Walther, 2011b).
The ubiquity of CMC is not sufficient impetus
for it to be a focus of study in interpersonal communication
research. How CMC changes our
messages—how they are constructed, whether for
specific relational purposes or with lesser or
greater effect—remain important questions that
continue to drive inquiry in interpersonal CMC
research. How does the Internet affect the likelihood
of having relationships? With whom? And
how do we manage these relationships? How do
disclosures and affectations influence others and
ourselves, and how do online interpersonal processes
affect the instrumental and group dynamics
that technology enables? How do we exploit
existing technologies for relational purposes, and
how do we evade the potential dampening effects
that technologies otherwise may impose on
relational communication? How do technology
444——PART IV: Processes and Functions
developers incorporate features into communication
systems specifically designed to support and
enhance relational functions?
There are many methodologies employed in
studying CMC and social interaction. Large-scale,
sophisticated surveys enumerate what people are
doing online and why they say they are doing
them (e.g., Katz & Rice, 2002; the Pew Internet &
American Life Project at http://pewinternet.org/).
There are accounts of the metaphors that define
the online experience for Internet date seekers
(e.g., Heino, Ellison, & Gibbs, 2010) and interpretive
investigators’ insights from interacting with
groups of young people about what is going on
and what it means online (boyd, 2007). Conference
proceedings from design experiments report cognitive
and affective responses to variations in the
representation of others’ online behaviors or different
interface characteristics with which to
behave online (e.g., the ACM Digital Library
at http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm). A number of
recent and forthcoming volumes address different
aspects of interpersonal interaction online,
including works by Amichai-Hamburger (2005),
Baym (2010), Joinson, McKenna, Postmes, and
Reips (2007), Konijn, Utz, Tanis, and Barnes
(2008), Papacharissi (2010), Whitty and Carr
(2006), and Wright and Webb (2011), among others.
Any of these approaches provide glimpses
into the changing landscape of interpersonal
communication and CMC. No one chapter can
paint this landscape or summarize it well. Worse
yet, such an amalgamation of facts would suffer
from a lack of coherence, reflecting a field with
more work being done than consensus on what
work should be done. Moreover, to describe what
people are doing interpersonally with CMC today
would be to invite obsolescence very quickly,
given the pace of change in communication and
technology. Readers who expect such an accounting
in this essay will be disappointed.
Alternatively, despite the field’s youth, there
are now a greater number of theoretical positions
directly related to CMC than any single overview
of the field has previously described. Some theories
have matured and are due for evaluation,
both in light of a number of empirical tests of
their validity, and intensions and extensions of
their explanatory power. New technological
developments may have enlarged or diminished
their relative scope. Newer theories have also
arisen, some barely tested, the ultimate utility of
which remains to be seen. This is not to suggest
that the only theories the field needs are those
focusing specifically on CMC. As Yzer and
Southwell (2008) suggested, the most useful
explanations of CMC may be those that rest
strongly on robust theories developed in traditional
contexts. For the present purposes, the
chapter focuses on CMC-specific theoretical formulations.
As Scott (2009) observed, “We can’t
keep up with new innovations, so we need theory
and models that can” (p. 754).
This chapter provides, first, a description and
evaluation of 13 major and minor theories of
CMC. Although readers may find many of these
approaches reviewed in other sources, particular
efforts have been made to review the theories’
development and status since the publication of
the previous edition of this Handbook (see
Walther & Parks, 2002). These theories are classified
according to their conceptualization of the
way users respond to the characteristics of CMC
systems, particularly in the adaptation to cue
systems that differ from face-to-face communication.
These theories include the now standard
classification of cues-filtered-out theories, which
assert that systematic reductions in the nonverbal
cues conveyed by different communication systems
lead to impersonal orientations among
users. There are differences among the foci of
impersonal orientations, some of which are asocial
and others quite specific and social in nature.
The second group of theories depicts how characteristics
of communicators, their interactions
with others, and contextual factors affect the
perceived capacities of different communication
systems. These perceptions, in turn, affect the
expressiveness and normative uses of these same
technologies as if the capacities themselves had
changed. The next set of theories reflects the
ways in which communicators adapt to or exploit
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——445
the cue limitations of CMC systems to achieve or
surpass face-to-face levels of affinity. Finally, new
theoretical ideas are mentioned that address the
utility of different media over the progression of
usage sequences or relational stages or compare
media effects of different kinds based on the relative
effortfulness of different channels. The discussion
includes numerous examples from
research that help exemplify critical findings
related to these frameworks.
The chapter ends with a few notes of concern
about trends in contemporary CMC research.
These trends represent understandable developments
given the nature of the field, yet they also
present potential problems in the further development
of knowledge in certain domains. These
concerns involve the role of face-to-face comparisons
in technology-focused research, the
potential impact of new technologies on earlier
CMC theories, and the implications of multimodality
in relationships (i.e., how to learn about
the usage of a variety of communication systems
within any single relationship).
Cues-Filtered-Out Theories
As numerous reviews have reflected, Culnan and
Markus (1987) coined the term cues-filtered-out
to describe a group of theories sharing the premise
that CMC has no nonverbal cues and therefore
occludes the accomplishment of social
functions that typically involve those cues.
Social Presence Theory
Social presence theory was imported from teleconferencing
research as one of the first analytic
frameworks applied to CMC. Short, Williams,
and Christie’s (1976) theory argued that various
communication media differed in their capacity
to transmit classes of nonverbal communication
in addition to verbal content. The fewer the
number of cue systems a system supported, the
less warmth and involvement users experienced
with one another. Hiltz, Johnson, and Agle (1978)
and Rice and Case (1983) first applied this model
to CMC, using it to predict that CMC rendered
less socio-emotional content than other, multimodal
forms of communication. Numerous experiments
supported these contentions. Nevertheless,
a number of theoretical and methodological
critiques by other researchers challenged the
social presence explanation of CMC dynamics
(e.g., Lea & Spears, 1992; Walther, 1992). These
critiques challenged several assumptions of the
social presence model and identified artifacts in
the research protocols that supported its application
to CMC.
Despite the demise of social presence in some
quarters of CMC research, extensive research
and definition efforts have continued with
respect to the role of presence with regard to settings
such as virtual reality and computer-based
gaming. Biocca, Harms, and Burgoon (2003)
suggested definitional issues that a robust theory
of social presence might require and the prospective
benefits of a renewed social presence
theory for comparing effects among various
media. K. M. Lee (2004) highlighted the various
conceptions of presence in related literatures,
including telepresence, copresence, and social
presence, as each construct describes somewhat
different states of awareness of the self and others
during electronic communication (see also
Lombard & Ditton, 1997). Nevertheless, the
various constructs and related measures are
often used interchangeably or in duplication.
Nowak and Biocca’s (2003) experiment on the
optimal level of anthropomorphism for avatars,
for example, compared the research participants’
responses to lifelike, cartoonish, or abstract avatars
on measures of presence, copresence, and
social presence. Each of the presence variables
reflected the same result: Abstract rather than
lifelike avatars stimulated the greatest presence
responses.
Although researchers have in large part
rejected the notion that CMC is inherently inferior
to traditional communication media on outcomes
such as social presence, there appears to be
a resurgence of presence-related evaluations that
446——PART IV: Processes and Functions
that were common in first-generation CMC (i.e.,
text-based e-mail, chat, and discussions) being
applied to next-generation CMC, which features
photos, graphics, avatars, or videos. Many individuals
apparently assume that we no longer
need to concern ourselves with earlier forms of
minimal-cue CMC (or research about them)
now that we have systems with greater bandwidth
and presence. Education technologists, in
particular, have been eager to recommend avatarbased
interactions in Second Life as a cure for
what remains, in the view of many, an impoverished
level of social presence in plain-text educational
conferencing (see Baker, Wentz, & Woods,
2009; Barnes, 2009; Childress & Braswell, 2006;
Gunawardena, 2004), without much evidence of
avatars’ interpersonal impact beyond what may
be expected due to novelty or to the hyperpersonal
intercultural potential of asynchronous
learning networks (e.g., Oren, Mioduser, &
Nachmias, 2002). In a world where we know our
communication partners by photo if not by face,
plain-text CMC with no additional multimedia
is, in some corners, being retro-conceptualized as
never having been quite good enough, especially
in comparison with the more presence-bearing
media that seem (for now) to be here to stay. It
appears that, although the formal theory of social
presence has become disregarded in many quarters
of CMC research, the concept of social presence
as an inherent consequence of multiple cues
remains alive and well (e.g., Bente, Rüggenberg,
Krämer, & Eschenburg, 2008).
It remains to be seen whether social presence
or some other construct and framework will
emerge to account for why individuals use various
new media for various relational activities.
Observers of the new multimodal world of relationships
have yet to identify coherent explanations
about the relational functions and goals to
which older new media and newer new media
are being strategically applied. Meanwhile,
plain-text messaging through e-mail, mobile
phones, and the 140-character Twitter tweet
suggest that text-based CMC is not at all gone.
The subject of multiple media, interpersonal
functions, and sequences is discussed once more
at the end of this chapter.
Lack of Social Context Cues
Like social presence theory, the lack of social
context cues hypothesis (Siegel, Dubrovsky,
Kiesler, & Mcguire, 1986; Sproull & Kiesler, 1986)
once guided numerous studies on the interpersonal
and group impacts of CMC, although it has
been more or less set aside in response to contradictions
that became apparent in native Internet
environments (see Sproull & Faraj, 1997), as well
as to formal theoretical and empirical challenges.
The framework originally specified that CMC
occluded the cues to individuality and normative
behavior that face-to-face interaction transacts
nonverbally. As a result, according to the model,
CMC users became deindividuated and normless;
CMC prevented users from attuning to others’
individual characteristics, such as charisma,
dominance, or affection, resulting in a cognitive
reorientation of its users. The lack of nonverbal
cues led them to become self-focused and resistant
to influence, disinhibited, belligerent, and
affectively negative.
As with social presence theory, a number of
critical issues related to the research paradigms
accompanying the lack of social context cues
approach, and to the various theoretical issues it
raised, have led to the model’s retreat. Negative
social responses to CMC have been accounted for
theoretically through more complex frameworks
that can explain both negative affective outcomes
as well as positive ones, in formulations
incorporating CMC’s impersonal, interpersonal,
and hyperpersonal effects (see Walther, 1996).
Researchers articulated alternative assumptions
and employed different research designs, leading
to the development of second-generation theories
of CMC. These latter positions predict different
social and interpersonal effects of CMC
media depending on other contextual factors
(Walther, 2010).
That said, research still surfaces that shares the
basic premises of the lack of social context cues
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——447
hypothesis, and such studies, ironically, often
include methodological strategies that were criticized
with regard to the original research on the
lack of social context cues and social presence
models. One such approach has appeared in several
experiments on compliance gaining and
social influence in CMC (e.g., Guadagno &
Cialdini, 2002): The absence of nonverbal cues in
CMC is said to prevent communicators from
detecting demographic, personality, and interpersonal
characteristics of others. The implication
in this case is that CMC confers no peripheral
cues to persuasion (see Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
As a result, it is suggested, CMC users process
messages based on argument strength—that is,
through central routes to persuasion alone—and
they experience less overall attitude change than
do off-line communicators. Methodologically,
such research has employed very short interaction
sessions among strangers in CMC and faceto-face
(e.g., Di Blasio & Milani, 2008), an
approach that has been demonstrated elsewhere
to impose a time-by-medium interaction effect,
artifactually dampening impression formation in
CMC (for a review, see Walther, 1992, 1996).
Other persuasion research following a lack
of social context cues approach apparently
employed short, scripted real-time chat sessions
as the operationalization of e-mail yet made
claims about e-mail’s persuasion-related potential
on that platform (Guadagno & Cialdini,
2007). Whereas gender-by-medium differences
in persuadability are obtained in such research, it
is difficult to know how to generalize these findings.
Using synchronous CMC chat to describe
asynchronous e-mail is a questionable, although
certainly not a novel, approach. This conflation
should be of concern, although differences due to
synchronous versus asynchronous CMC remain
understudied in CMC research.
In a similar vein, Epley and Kruger (2005)
argued that e-mail’s lack of nonverbal cues prevents
users from deciphering others’ individual
characteristics following the presentation of a
false pre-interaction expectancy about a pending
conversational partner. The authors conducted
several experiments in which they primed interviewers
to expect a high or low level of intelligence
or extraversion from an interviewee. Some
dyads communicated using a voice-based system,
while so-called e-mail communicators used a
real-time CMC chat system. In the voice conditions,
although conversations were restricted to
simple, predetermined questions and spontaneous
answers, they constituted actual interactions
between two real (randomly assigned) persons.
In contrast, there was no real interaction between
CMC interviewers and their ostensible interviewees,
since the responses interviewers received
to their questions were sent by a researcher who
had transcribed what a voice-based interviewee
had said to a different, voice-based interviewer.
This research strategy was intended to prevent
the introduction of random variations in CMC
users’ language in order to provide a true test of
the difference between CMC and speech. Epley
and Kruger found that expectancies persisted in
the post-CMC evaluations of partners, although
they dissipated in voice.
A replication of this work by Walther,
DeAndrea, and Tong (2010) challenged the former
study’s methods, particularly the use of
transcribed speech as the operationalization of
CMC interviewee responses. This concern
focused on the lack of real interactions in the
prior study and the employment of language that
had been generated accompanying voice, in
speech, as if it was structurally and functionally
identical to the language that is generated in
spontaneous CMC, where communicators know
that there are no vocal cues to convey identity
and social meanings. Walther, DeAndrea, and
Tong argued that CMC users adapt to the
medium by altering their language in a way that
compensates for the absence of nonverbal cues.
Their study therefore involved bona fide interviewees
in both voice and CMC who could generate
naturalistic responses to interviewers in
both media. CMC users’ postdiscussion impressions
were rated as more intelligent than those of
voice-based partners, in contrast to Epley and
Kruger’s (2005) findings and consistent with the
448——PART IV: Processes and Functions
hyperpersonal model of CMC (Walther, 1996).
Impressions changed in conjunction with the
number of utterances exchanged, consistent with
the social information processing theory of CMC
(Walther, 1992).
Indeed, the history of contradictions between
cues-filtered-out findings and the more prosocial
effects of CMC can be explained in part by the
methodological constraints on CMC interaction,
which reflect competing theoretical orientations
about communication and CMC (Fulk & Gould,
2009; Walther, 2010).
Media Richness
Media richness theory (Daft & Lengel, 1986),
also known as information richness theory (Daft
& Lengel, 1984), originally modeled the relative
efficiency of different communication media for
reducing equivocality in organizational decision
making. It has also been applied to interpersonal
situations either formally or informally. The
term rich media is often used casually in the
literature to signify multimodal or greaterbandwidth
media, that is, communication media
that support multiple verbal and nonverbal cue
systems.
Media richness theory seems to be one of the
most popular models of CMC (for a review, see
D’Urso & Rains, 2008). This may be because some
of its core constructs are so intuitively appealing,
especially the media richness construct. This construct,
in turn, is defined theoretically by four
subdimensions: (1) the number of cue systems
supported by a medium, (2) the immediacy of
feedback provided by a medium (from unidirectional
to asynchronously bidirectional to simultaneous
bidirectional interaction), (3) the potential
for natural language (compared with the more
formal genre of memoranda, business letters, or
data printouts), and (4) message personalization
(i.e., the degree to which a message can be made
to address a specific individual). So in the original
formulation, face-to-face communication is the
richest mode because it includes multiple-cue
systems, simultaneous sender-and-receiver
exchanges (providing great immediacy of feedback),
natural language, and message personalization.
Telephones, letters, and memoranda each
offer progressively declining levels of richness.
The second core construct of the model is the
equivocality of a messaging situation. Equivocality
is defined as the degree to which a decisionmaking
situation and information related to it are
subject to multiple interpretations.
The theory argues that there is a match
between the equivocality of a message situation
and the richness of the medium with which to
address it: To be most efficient, greater equivocality
requires more media richness, and lesser
equivocality requires leaner media. Although the
theory was originally formulated so that the result
of optimal match (or of mismatch) affects efficiency,
it is often described in the literature as
being related to communication effectiveness.
It is somewhat surprising that the theory
remains as frequently employed as it does given
that, even within the domain of organizational
communication, it has a poor history of empirical
support. The first empirical investigation of the
theory (Daft, Lengel, & Trevino, 1987) addressed
it indirectly by asking managers to indicate in a
questionnaire what media they would use to
address a list of various communication situations.
These situations had been rated by other
research participants in terms of their equivocality.
The degree to which the test managers’ media
selections (in terms of richness) matched the situations’
equivocality led to a media sensitivity score
for each manager. Through inspection of the
same managers’ personnel evaluations, researchers
found a correlation between media sensitivity
and managerial performance. These results were
interpreted as supporting the theory.
One can see that the investigation described
above does not actually test the theoretical relationships
specified by the theory; rather, it evaluates
peripheral processes and implications that
may be related to the model less directly. That is,
rather than examining direct relationships
between the actual use of differently rich media,
equivocal message situations, and efficiency
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——449
(e.g., the time and effort required), Daft et al.
(1987) examined organizationally related implications
of managers’ projections of media selection.
Such findings have been contested by other
researchers in a variety of ways. For example,
Markus (1994) questions whether the projective,
self-report approach to asking managers what
media they would choose for various communication
tasks generalizes to managers’ actual
media use. In her own study, Markus found that
managers express media selection preferences
very consistent with the matches prescribed by
Daft and Lengel (1986) when completing questionnaires.
By shadowing several managers, however,
Markus found that their media selection
behavior frequently departed from their questionnaire
responses. It appears that managers
hold normative beliefs about media choice that
align with the media richness model but the normal
constraints and spontaneous-communication
needs that they face lead them to select
media in ways that defy media richness sensibilities,
and according to Markus, they do not suffer
any decrement in performance as a result.
A second significant threat to the model came
in the form of an experiment by Dennis and
Kinney (1998) that sought to test directly the
core theoretical dynamics of media richness theory
as well as its extension toward interpersonal
perceptions of online collaborators. This study
involved small groups that addressed a simple or
equivocal task, using videoconferencing (greater
in richness) or text-based messaging (lower in
richness). They found that media richness produced
differences in the time it took different
groups to complete their tasks. Media richness
did not, however, interact with task equivocality
to affect decision quality or interpersonal perceptions.
More recent work examined media richness
variations with differences in high-context
versus low-context cultural backgrounds of users
(Setlock, Quinones, & Fussell, 2007). Researchers
predicted that there would be more benefit from
using videoconferencing than from a reducedbandwidth
medium among those from a highcontext
culture (see Hall, 1976). Culture, however,
did not interact with media richness differences
on conversational efficiency, task performance,
or satisfaction.
Walther and Parks (2002) criticized the model
as being unable to generate hypotheses that apply
to many forms of CMC. Their concern focused
on the four subdimensions of richness. When
applying these criteria to traditional media, it is
easy to see that all four dimensions tend to vary in
conjunction with one another as one compares
media. As one moves away from face-to-face to
memoranda, for example, there are fewer code
systems, less immediacy of feedback, less natural
language, and little message personalization.
However, e-mail does not fit into this scheme so
neatly. Although e-mail is generally text based and
therefore low in multiple codes, it may be
exchanged relatively rapidly (if all addressees are
online at the same time), it may use natural language
(or formal language), and its capacity for
message personalization is great. Likewise, one
may use Facebook to broadcast information
about oneself to a large audience, but Facebook
also features public displays of relatively private
one-to-one messages between friends that are
sometimes very personally, even idiosyncratically,
encoded. As these examples should make clear,
media richness theory offers no clear method for
ascribing a unitary richness value when the
underlying criteria that constitute richness may
reflect very different values, and researchers cannot
apply the model to media that offer so much
variation among richness characteristics. This
issue may be an underlying factor that has contributed
to the troubling level of empirical support
for the model in CMC research.
Notwithstanding the troubling level of empirical
support, media richness theory continues to
be applied to new media and new interpersonal
settings (without much success). For instance,
Cummings, Lee, and Kraut (2006) used media
richness theory to predict that friends from high
school use telephone and face-to-face contact
more frequently than CMC to maintain their
friendships when they transition to college. Their
results showed, however, that CMC was the most
450——PART IV: Processes and Functions
frequently used medium among such friends.
Rather than abandon the media richness framework,
the authors conjectured that the relatively
greater expense of making long-distance phone
calls interfered with their predictions.
In a different vein, Hancock, Thom-Santelli,
and Ritchie (2004) used media richness theory
in a study comparing individuals’ media preferences
for deceiving another person. They argued
that lying can be considered an equivocal message,
and therefore, individuals should select
rich media such as face-to-face or telephone for
deception more often than they would choose
text-based chat or e-mail. Results of a diary
study did not support the hypothesis. Telephone
was the most frequently used medium for
deception, followed by face-to-face and instant
messaging (which did not differ from each
other), and e-mail was the least frequently used
medium for deception. Hancock et al. (2004)
concluded with a features-based explanation of
their findings: Individuals resist the use of
media that are recordable (such as CMC) so
that their lies cannot be caught later or provide
evidence with which to hold them to account.
The recordability characteristic of new media,
they argued, questions the applicability of
media richness’s assumption that communication
channels differ along a single dimension.
Interestingly, more recent research identifying
an abundance of deception in date-finding websites
has yet to be reconciled with this study’s
conclusion that liars avoid recordable and
accountable media.
The Social Identity Model of
Deindividuation Effects
The social identity model of deindividuation
effects, or SIDE model, has had an interesting evolution
in the literature. Although its developers
have argued that it is decidedly not about interpersonal
communication, at least in terms of the
mechanisms that generate its predictions (e.g.,
Postmes & Baym, 2005), it has been applied to
many settings that appear to be interpersonal in
nature. At one point, SIDE was one of the most
dominant theories of CMC. Changes to the theory
in response to empirical challenges and changes in
communication technology—attributes that bear
on the theory’s central assumptions—appear to
have accompanied a marginal decline in its popularity
and scope. In certain contexts, however, it
remains a most parsimonious and robust explanatory
framework for CMC dynamics.
The SIDE model is included here as a cuesfiltered-out
theory because it, like others, considers
the absence of nonverbal cues in CMC as
an impersonalizing deterrent to the expression
and detection of individuality and the development
of interpersonal relations online. The
SIDE model differs from other cues-filtered-out
approaches, however, in that rather than leave
users with no basis for impressions or relations
at all, it predicts that CMC shifts users toward a
different form of social relations based on social
self-categorization. The SIDE model (Lea &
Spears, 1992; Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995)
specifies two factors that drive online behavior.
The first factor is the visual anonymity that
occurs when CMC users send messages to one
another through text (in real-time chat or in
asynchronous conferencing and e-mail). When
communicators cannot see each other, the model
puts forth, communicators do not attune themselves
to one another on the basis of their interindividual
differences. Drawing on principles of
social identification and self-categorization theories
(Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1979), the
model originally argued that visual anonymity
led to deindividuation, or a loss of awareness
with regard to one’s own (and others’) individuality.
When in such a state of deindividuation,
the second major factor in the theory comes into
play: whether CMC users orient themselves to
some salient social category or group (i.e., a
social identification). If a CMC user experiences
a social identification, the user will relate to
other CMC users on the basis of in-group (or
out-group) dynamics. These classifications then
drive users’ perceptions of similarity and attraction
toward online partners in gross terms, that
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——451
is, as a unified perception based on of whether
others online seem to belong to the same group
that is salient to the user, rather than as a sum or
average of one’s perceptions of each other partner
in a conversation.
The model also specified, theoretically, that
when a deindividuated CMC user orients to an
individualistic identification rather than a social
identification, then systematic effects on similarity
and attraction should not occur. The model
views interpersonal (rather than group) attraction
toward other members as an aggregation of
randomly distributed values based on a person’s
attraction to each idiosyncratic individual. That
is, when perceiving others individually, one may
like one person a lot, dislike another person a lot,
and like others to different degrees, which, on
balance, should average to some neutral level.
Attraction to a group to which one belongs, in
contrast, should be systematically positive. This
difference in the form of attraction marks a key
distinction between a group-based and an interpersonally
based approach to the social dynamics
of CMC (Lea, Spears, & de Groot, 2001; for a
review, see Walther & Carr, 2010).
The most basic research strategy that provided
evidence for SIDE involved experiments manipulating
the two factors, visual anonymity and type
of identification. In a prototypical experiment,
one half of the small groups of CMC users in
an experiment would communicate with one
another using a text-based chat system only,
whereas the other half would use the chat system
and be shown photos that were supposed to represent
the members. The former condition provides
visual anonymity, presumably instigating
deindividuation, whereas the latter condition
involves visual identification and individuation.
The second factor, group identification, is manipulated
by prompting participants explicitly to
look for the unique and distinctive characteristics
of the group in which they were involved rather
than to try to detect what made the individuals
with whom they were conversing unique and
different from one another. Such research has
produced predicted interaction effects of visual
anonymity/identifiability by group/interpersonal
identity, with conditions involving both visual anonymity
and group identity providing the greatest
scores on attraction (e.g., Lea & Spears, 1992).
The SIDE model’s advocates originally argued
that the nature of group memberships with
which CMC users identified comprised fairly
general social categories (e.g., English vs. Dutch
nationalities, psychology vs. business majors,
men vs. women, etc.). Although attempts to
arouse these kinds of identifications have been
employed in SIDE experiments, they have not
produced effects as clearly as when identification
was targeted only with the local group, that is, the
unique and specific small group involved in the
interaction. These results have led to revisions of
the SIDE model, and recent versions focus on
visually anonymous CMC leading to in-group
identification with the group of participants
rather than via larger social categories.
Although the SIDE model is distinctively not
about an interpersonal basis for online relations,
it has been argued to offer an explanatory framework
for what others consider to be interpersonal
phenomena. Lea and Spears (1995) argued
that SIDE can explain the development of
romantic relationships online. Rejecting notions
that intimate attraction is necessarily and exclusively
premised on physical appearance or the
exchange of nonverbal cues (a rejection with
which several other CMC theories in this chapter,
described below, concur), they argued that intimacy
may result from the perceptions of similarity
that arise from a couple’s shared membership
in a variety of social categories (see also Sanders,
1997). From this perceptive, although partners
who communicate romantically online may
believe that they love each other interpersonally,
this would be an illusion. Their projection of
interpersonal intimacy would be an outgrowth
and projection of the similarity/attraction they
share on the basis of their social (rather than
interpersonal) identifications. Other essays have
made quite strident pronouncements about the
superiority of a groups-based, rather than an
interpersonally-based, approach to understanding
452——PART IV: Processes and Functions
a variety of online social responses. They have
gone so far as to suggest that interpersonally
based explanations for systematic social effects in
online behavior are empirically conflicting and
conceptually misleading and that they have
impeded theoretical understanding about CMC
effects (Postmes & Baym, 2005).
Despite these pronouncements about its overarching
superiority as an organizing model for
the entire field, the SIDE model seems now to be
taking a more appropriately limited place in
CMC research. This change appears to be due to
uncertainties about the components of the model
itself, empirical “competitions” in which social
and interpersonal components both appear, and
new media forms that alternately extend or
restrict the scope of SIDE’s domain.
The deindividuation aspect of the model itself
has been redefined (see E.-J. Lee, 2004). Although
visual anonymity is still a key predictor of SIDE’s
effects, empirical studies have led to questions
about the deindividuation that anonymity was
said to produce, in terms of its actual potency
and its theoretical necessity in the model.
Research has found that in some cases SIDE-like
responses to an anonymous online crowd are
greater when a CMC user is more, rather than
less, self-aware (Douglas & McGarty, 2001). This
and other studies have led SIDE theorists to
argue that it is not deindividuation but rather
depersonalization—the inability to tell who is
who online—that is (and always has been) the
construct on which SIDE phenomena depend. It
is admirable that the theory is open to such
modification, although it represents a significant
departure from the important elements of social
identity theory on which it originally drew and
from assertions that were argued strongly in earlier
articulations of the model.
Responding in part to SIDE advocates’ claims
that their model could explain seemingly interpersonal
effects, researchers made efforts to
demonstrate more carefully whether group or
interpersonal factors were operating in their
CMC studies. Greater attention has been paid to
whether the operationalizations and measurements
involved in research can discern group-based
constructs from interpersonally based constructs
(Wang, 2007). Moreover, experiments have directly
compared SIDE-based versus interpersonallybased
factors in the same study for their effects
on the responses of CMC groups. Rogers and
Lea (2004), for example, studied a number of
virtual groups composed of students in England
and the Netherlands who worked over an
extended period of time via asynchronous conferencing
and real-time chat. Steps were employed
to maximize the salience of each virtual group’s
unique identity (i.e., researchers addressed groups
by their collective name only, rather than individually
by member). Repeated measures indicated
that group attraction did not maintain
evenly or increase over time. To the contrary,
interpersonal affiliation among members reflected
marginal increases over the duration of the
groups’ experience. More recently, Wang, Walther,
and Hancock’s (2009) experiment with visually
anonymous online groups involved a SIDE-based
assignment of four members to two distinct subgroups.
The researchers further prompted one
member of each four-person group to enact
interpersonally friendly (or unfriendly) behaviors
toward the rest of the members. In general, other
members evaluated the deviants in each group on
the basis of the individuals’ interpersonal behaviors
and not on the basis of those individuals’ ingroup
or out-group status with respect to other
subgroup members. These results suggest that
SIDE is less robust than previously suggested
when CMC users confront bona fide behavioral
differences among members while remaining
visually anonymous. A recent essay offers a more
tempered view of when SIDE and other intergroup
dynamics are likely to arise in CMC and
when they give way to interpersonal dynamics
(Walther & Carr, 2010).
Recent revisions to the SIDE model have also
retracted its previous assertions that visually
anonymous CMC users cannot, theoretically,
relate to one another as individuals (Postmes,
Baray, Haslam, Morton, & Swaab, 2006; Postmes,
Spears, Lee, & Novak, 2005). Now individuals are
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——453
seen, over time and under conditions of visual
anonymity, to form relationships with each other
first and then to identify with and form attachments
to the small, interacting group. Group
identification arises inductively in this new perspective.
These formulations represent a major
departure from SIDE’s previous assumptions.
They also leave unaddressed the mechanisms by
which interacting individuals online become sufficiently
attracted to one another to provide the
interpersonal motivation, attraction, and reward
that may be required to facilitate the durations of
interaction required for individuals to develop an
emergent group identity.
New media forms also raise interesting issues
with regard to SIDE’s scope. Many new technologies
seem quite amenable to SIDE analysis of
their effects on users, while others seem distinctly
out of its reach. Communication systems such as
social network sites, which confront CMC users
with photos of prospective interactants, resemble
the control group conditions in the prototypical
SIDE experiment, that is, the visually identified
conditions for which SIDE predicts no systematic
effects. Alternatively, some new Web-based communication
systems are very compatible with
SIDE dynamics (see Walther, 2009): CMC systems
display anonymous comments with no
visual identification of other commenters, no
interaction with other commenters, and the relatively
clear implication that participants belong
to the same social group. A recent study drew on
SIDE theory successfully to predict readers’
responses to the comments apparently left by
other YouTube viewers in reaction to antimarijuana
public service announcements. Researchers
appended experimentally created comment sets
(featuring all-positive or all-negative comments)
to institutionally produced antimarijuana videos
on YouTube pages. The more the participants
identified with the ostensible commenters, the
more the valence of those comments affected viewers’
attitudes about the public service announcement
videos and about marijuana (Walther,
DeAndrea, Kim, & Anthony, 2010). The propagation
of visually and authorially anonymous
reviews or talk-back sites on the Web merits further
analysis from a SIDE perspective.
Signaling Theory
Donath (1999) was the first to suggest a theoretical
basis underlying the skepticism CMC
users often hold about the legitimacy of others’
online self-presentation and how CMC facilitates
such deception. Prior to Donath’s position,
references abounded (and are still heard) regarding
the anonymity of the Internet facilitating
deception, although anonymity is a complex
concept with various potential meanings pertaining
to online interaction (see Rains & Scott,
2007). Anonymity’s lack of utility in the case of
deception is captured in the fact that individuals
may lie about themselves (online or off) using
their real names or pseudonyms. A better explanation
for why people mistrust others’ self-presentations
is needed, and Donath’s (1999)
approach provides a reasonable one to explain
why people trust many forms of information
that are communicated off-line but tend to mistrust
the kind of information individuals provide
about themselves that is most prevalent in
CMC discussions.
According to Donath, the fields of economics
and biology have contributed to the development
of signaling theory, which Donath then applied to
the evaluation of self-presentational claims in
text-based discussion fora. Signaling theory,
Donath reviews (2007), shows “why certain signals
are reliable and others are not. For a signal to
be reliable, the costs of deceptively producing
the signal must outweigh the benefits.” Within
signaling theory there are two types of signals.
Assessment signals are artifacts that have an inherent
and natural relationship with some characteristic
with which they are associated. An animal
that has very large horns, for example, must be
strong; strength is required to support large,
heavy horns. It would be impossible to support
very heavy horns without being strong, that is, to
deceive about one’s strength using such horns;
one could not falsely bear heavy horns if one did
454——PART IV: Processes and Functions
not actually possess the strength to do so.
Conventional signals, on the other hand, bear
socially determined symbolic relationships with
their referents. Verbal claims about the possession
of some attribute such as strength may be conventionally
understood in terms of the intention of
the claim, but ultimately, conventional signals
are not as trustworthy as assessment signals.
Conventional signals cost little to manufacture or
construct, and they are therefore less trustworthy.
Text-based online discussions, Donath (1999)
proposed, are dominated by conventional signals
since such discussions are composed only of verbal
statements. Because self-descriptive claims
can easily be faked through verbal discourse, she
argues, there is (rightfully) considerable wariness
about whether online discussants can be trusted
entirely to be who they say they are.
Rare in the animal world, conventional
signals are very common in human communication.
The self-descriptions in online
profiles are mostly conventional signals—it
is just as easy to type 24 or 62 as it is to
enter one’s actual age, or to put M rather
than F as one’s gender. (Donath, 2007)
In the context of text-based CMC, Donath’s
(1999, 2007) application of signaling theory
appears to have limited predictive utility and to
raise certain validity questions. The perspective
suggests no limiting factor to the general proposition
that users should be suspicious of verbal
claims and self-descriptions in CMC. Although
the framework helps us understand online skepticism,
it does not provide much in terms of
variations in observers’ assessments of others’
online veracity, although questions of credibility
in CMC have received ample attention from several
other perspectives (e.g., Metzger, Flanagin,
Eyal, Lemus, & McCann, 2003; Sundar, 2008).
Second, the perspective does not consider whether
there are indeed characteristics that are
transmitted sufficiently reliably through text and
language alone. It is hard to imagine, for instance,
that an individual could convey being articulate
or being humorous online unless the individual
actually possessed those characteristics. In such
cases, verbal behavior should constitute assessment
signals rather than conventional signals.
These and other qualities that language might
reliably convey are not considered in the application
of signaling theory to CMC.
To her credit, Donath (2007) has expanded the
application of signaling to explain the benefits
and potentials of social network sites in helping
observers assess the veracity of others’ online
claims. Like Walther and Parks’ (2002) warranting
theory (described below), she contends that the
ability to contact other individuals in a target’s
social network reduces the likelihood that the
target will engage in deception. From a signaling
theory perspective, an observer’s ability to discern
a target’s deception may result in social sanctions
or punishment for the target. These negative
repercussions are seen as costly in the parlance of
economic theory, and knowing that these costs
could accrue provides a disincentive for social
network site users to prevaricate in their profiles.
Thus, social network sites, unlike text-based discussion
systems that are divorced from an individual’s
off-line social network, should reduce
deception and increase the trust that CMC users
place in others. These suggestions are yet to be
tested, although the findings reported by Toma,
Hancock, and Ellison (2008) and Warkentin,
Woodworth, Hancock, and Cormier (2010) are
consistent with this notion. DeAndrea and
Walther (in press) found, however, that individuals
are quite well aware of their friends’ distorted
self-presentations on Facebook profiles.
Experiential and Perceptual
Theories of CMC
Electronic Propinquity Theory
The theory of electronic propinquity (Korzenny,
1978) received brief mention in the previous
edition of the Handbook’s chapter on CMC
(Walther & Parks, 2002). Those comments noted
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——455
that relatively little attention had been paid to the
theory since its first appearance in 1978 and its
original follow-up in 1981 (Korzenny & Bauer,
1981; cf. Monge, 1980). Possibly because the
most advanced technology mentioned in its
introduction was interactive closed-circuit television,
the theory has almost escaped the attention
of the CMC research literature. Its formal structure
and the nature of its constructs, however,
leave it quite amenable to forms of CMC that can
be characterized in terms of their bandwidth and
interactivity. The theory has received a modicum
of renewed attention since 2002, including
empirical research that may contribute to a
renewal of interest in its potential.
The central construct in electronic propinquity
theory is the psychological closeness experienced
by communicators. Whereas physical
closeness or proximity is generally associated
with interpersonal involvement in face-to-face
communication, Korzenny (1978) argued that
communicators connected through electronic
media could also experience a sense of closeness,
or electronic propinquity.
The theory specified the main and interaction
effects on electronic propinquity from a number
of specific factors. The first factor is bandwidth,
or the capacity of a channel to convey multiplecue
systems (like the first factor in media richness,
described above, which followed propinquity
theory historically); the greater the bandwidth,
the more the propinquity. Mutual directionality
(like immediacy of feedback) increases propinquity,
as do users’ greater communication skills,
the lower (rather than higher) level of complexity
of a task, fewer communication rules, and fewer
choices among alternative media. These factors
also interact with each other, as specified in a
series of derived theorems: The greater the bandwidth,
the less the effect of task difficulty; the
greater users’ skills, the less the effect of more
communication rules; and the fewer the choices
among media, the less the effect of bandwidth.
Although the theory predated the Internet,
these theoretical properties provide a sufficiently
open-ended definitional framework in which
specific media may be considered even though
they did not exist when the theory was created.
Therefore CMC, with or without auditory and/or
visual cues, can fit neatly into electronic propinquity’s
calculus. Owing in part to a failed test using
traditional media in an experiment by Korzenny
and Bauer (1981), until recently, no such application
to CMC had been examined empirically.
A recent replication of electronic propinquity
theory’s original test has indicated greater validity
for the theory and has successfully applied it to
CMC. Walther and Bazarova (2008) identified a
confound in Korzenny and Bauer’s (1981) original
experiment that they attempted to isolate in a
new empirical study. The confound had to do
with the theory’s proposition that the fewer the
number of media choices one has, the greater the
propinquity one experiences with the remaining
medium, a dynamic that may have been present
in Korzenny and Bauer’s study but was unplanned
and unchecked. Walther and Bazarova investigated
this factor directly. They created experimental
groups that alternatively had two media
among their members (e.g., audioconferencing
among all members but additional videoconferencing
among a subset of members) or had
only one medium connecting everyone. Media
included face-to-face discussion, videoconferencing,
audio conferencing, and text-based chat.
Results supported the proposition about the
effect of media choice and bandwidth. Those
who had no choices (i.e., only one medium)
experienced greater propinquity using that
medium than did those who used the same
medium among two media present, when it was
the lower bandwidth medium of the two. For
example, text-based chat produced greater propinquity
and satisfaction ratings when chat was
the only channel a group was able to use, compared
with ratings of chat in groups where a
member used both chat and audio conferencing.
These patterns persisted along all the media
combinations evaluated in the study: “There
were no differences between ratings obtained as a
result of chat, voice, video, or FtF communication
among groups who used only one medium”
456——PART IV: Processes and Functions
(Walther & Bazarova, 2008, p. 640), although the
use of two media consistently led to less propinquity
for the lower bandwidth medium. The
experiment offered further support for the theory.
It demonstrated complex interactions among
choice, bandwidth, communicator skill, and task
difficulty, which generally supported electronic
propinquity’s predictions.
In addition to the renewed potential for the
application of propinquity theory to emerging
media, Walther and Bazarova (2008) suggested that
these results may help account for discrepancies in
the existing literature on the social effects of CMC.
Numerous studies that have examined natural
CMC uses in field settings often indicate that it is
less preferred by users for relationships and group
maintenance than other, higher bandwidth media
and face-to-face interactions. In contrast, numerous
experimental studies show relatively high levels
of satisfaction and positive relational communication
using CMC alone under various circumstances.
Electronic propinquity theory’s unique
focus on the effects of media choice helps resolve
this discrepancy. It alerts us to the notion that when
communicators are aware or have a history of alternative
media options for a specific relationship,
CMC should be expected to be the least satisfying.
Where communicators are constrained to one
channel alone, as experiments often require, electronic
propinquity theory explains how users quite
readily apply communication skills to make the
remaining available medium effective and satisfying.
Whether there are many real-world settings
where users are constrained in this way to a single
medium is a different question, but electronic propinquity
theory helps unlock what had been an
unexplained paradox in the research literature with
regard to these conflicting empirical findings.
Social Influence Theory
The social influence approach to media richness
(Fulk, Schmitz, & Steinfield, 1990; Fulk, Steinfield,
Schmitz, & Power, 1987), like channel expansion
theory (described below; Carlson & Zmud,
1999), focuses on the factors that change users’
perceptions about the capacities of CMC and
their consequent uses of the medium. It may be
important to note that this approach shifts the
definition of media richness to a perceptually
based phenomenon describing how expressively a
medium may be used. This departs from media
richness theory’s approach, which defines media
richness based on the a priori properties of media.
Social influence theory rejects those aspects of
media richness (and social presence) theory that
argue that certain properties of media exclusively
determine their expressive capabilities and their
utility in interpersonal (and other) domains.
Instead, Fulk et al. (1987) argue, the nature of
media and their potentials are socially constructed,
and the richness and utility of a medium are
affected by interaction with other individuals in
one’s social network. Following from this networkanalytic
perspective, the theory predicts that one’s
strong ties have more influence on one’s perception
of CMC richness than do one’s weak ties. In organizational
settings, these distinctions include one’s
close coworkers versus workers in other organizational
units. The authors of the model suggest that
social interaction with network ties may include
overt discussions about communication media and
their uses. It may also include communications
with one’s ties via a given CMC medium, and the
qualities of those exchanges also shape perceptions
about that medium’s potential and normative uses.
Social influence has received robust support in
previous empirical studies. Research testing the
model shows stronger correspondence between
individuals’ perceptions of e-mail’s richness and
those of their strongly tied coworkers than those of
weakly tied coworkers. Research has established the
cognitive and perceptual basis of these effects:
One’s attitudes about e-mail’s utility correspond
primarily with one’s perceptions about one’s
coworkers’ perceptions and secondarily with
those coworkers’ actual attitudes. These differences
between direct perceptions and metaperceptions
help demonstrate that the social influence
process is not a magic bullet but a communication
process that leads to individuals’ reconstructions of
others’ messages (Fulk, Schmitz, & Ryu, 1995).
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——457
The social influence model has not received
very much research attention recently. Its developers
have shifted their focus after having set a
precedent for complex research strategies exploring
social influence that would not be simple to
replicate. Nevertheless, how users construct perceptions
about the potential and preferred uses
of newer communication technologies may be a
topic of renewed attention. Social network websites,
for example, make most visible one’s strong
and weak ties. They make evident what the normative
expressive and usage practices of one’s
friends are. These phenomena correspond quite
clearly to the theoretical factors implicated in
social influence theory, and future research on
how different groups of users evolve different
standards and norms for messaging via these
systems can benefit from a social influence
approach.
Channel Expansion Theory
Channel expansion theory (Carlson & Zmud,
1994, 1999) also takes issue with the fixed properties
ascribed to various media in media richness
theory. Whereas social influence theory
focuses on how dynamic interaction in a social
network of communicators predicts and explains
how users come to perceive CMC’s richness, the
primary focus of channel expansion theory is on
internal, experiential factors. The theory’s original,
central argument is that as individuals gain
more experience with a particular communication
medium, the medium becomes richer for
them (Carlson & Zmud, 1994). That is, theoretically,
it becomes more capable for the conduct of
equivocal and interpersonally oriented communication
tasks. With experience, the authors
argued, users learn how to encode and decode
affective messages using a particular channel.
The channel expansion theory was expanded
to include increasing familiarity with an interaction
partner as a second major factor affecting
the richness or expressiveness of a medium that
is used to communicate with that partner, with
experience related to the conversational topic
and organizational experience as additional,
potential factors (Carlson & Zmud, 1999). Social
influence by other communicators was posited to
affect richness perceptions as well. The model
was tested by its developers in a cross-sectional
survey and in a longitudinal panel study, in both
cases focusing only on e-mail. The first study
produced a moderate correlation between experience
using e-mail and e-mail richness perceptions
(see also Foulger, 1990) as well as a
correlation between familiarity with the conversational
partner and e-mail richness (Carlson &
Zmud, 1999). The panel study likewise found an
increase in perceived e-mail richness commensurate
with e-mail experience over time. Social
influence was not significant.
The theory lay dormant until D’Urso and
Rains (2008) replicated and expanded investigation
of the model. These researchers included
traditional media (face-to-face and telephone)
as well as text-based chat, along with e-mail, in a
survey of organizational users. Results were
fairly consistent with Carlson and Zmud’s (1999)
findings with respect to new media. For chat and
e-mail, experience with the media, and no other
variables, affected media richness ratings. For
traditional media, only social influence and
experience with one’s conversation partner, and
not experience with the medium, affected richness
perceptions.
Channel expansion theory offers an antidote
to the inconsistencies of media richness research
in a sense. The learning-based explanation that
channel expansion theory offers is reasonable
and intuitive. At the same time, other approaches
deal with several of the theory’s elements in more
sophisticated (as well as in more complicated)
ways. For instance, CMC users’ ability to encode
and decode personal and social cues is central to
the social information processing theory of CMC
(see below); the influence of others’ richness perceptions
is demonstrated more particularly in
social influence theory; and electronic propinquity
theory offers a different account for why
the same medium may offer more psychological
closeness and satisfaction in some circumstances
458——PART IV: Processes and Functions
and less in others by specifying a constellation of
situational, media, and user characteristics.
Theories of Interpersonal
Adaptation and Exploitation
of Media
Social Information Processing
The social information processing (SIP) theory
of CMC (Walther, 1992) has become a widely
used framework for explaining and predicting
differences between text-based CMC and off-line
communication, and recent work has made
efforts to expand its scope to include newer, multimedia
forms of online communication. The
theory seeks to explain how, with time, CMC
users are able to accrue impressions of and relations
with others online, and these relations
achieve the level of development that is expected
through off-line communication.
The theory articulates several assumptions
and propositions concerning what propels these
effects. It explicitly recognizes that CMC is devoid
of the nonverbal communication cues that
accompany face-to-face communication. It differs,
however, from theories of CMC that argue
that the lack of nonverbal cues impedes impressions
and relations or reorients users’ attention to
impersonal states or to group-based forms of
relating. The SIP theory articulates the assumption
that communicators are motivated to
develop interpersonal impressions and affinity
regardless of medium. It further proposes that
when nonverbal cues are unavailable, communicators
adapt their interpersonal (as well as instrumental)
communication to whatever cues remain
available through the channel that they are using.
Thus, in text-based CMC, the theory expects
individuals to adapt the encoding and decoding
of social information (i.e., socioemotional or
relational messages) into language and the timing
of messages. Although many readers of the
theory have interpreted this argument to refer to
emoticons (typed-out smiles, frowns, and other
faces; e.g., Derks, Bos, & von Grumbkow, 2007),
the theory implicates language content and style
characteristics as more primary conduits of
interpersonal information.
A second major contention of SIP is that CMC
operates at a rate different from face-to-face communication
in terms of users’ ability to achieve
levels of impression and relational definition
equivalent to face-to-face interaction. Because
verbal communication with no nonverbal cues
conveys a fraction of the information of multimodal
communication, communication functions
should require a longer time to take place.
CMC users need time to compensate for the
slower rate in order to accumulate sufficient information
with which to construct cognitive models
of partners and to emit and receive messages with
which to negotiate relational status and definition.
With respect to the first major theoretical
contention, recent research has demonstrated
that communicators adapt social meanings into
CMC language that they would otherwise express
nonverbally. Walther, Loh, and Granka (2005)
had dyads discuss a controversial issue: face-toface
or via real-time computer chat. In each dyad,
prior to their dyadic discussion, the researchers
privately prompted one of the members to
increase or decrease his or her friendliness toward
the other individual by whatever means that person
chose to do so. The naive partner rated the ad
hoc confederate after the interaction was over,
providing ratings of the confederate’s immediacy
and affection dimensions of relational communication.
Coders then analyzed recordings of the
face-to-face confederates for the kinesic, vocalic,
and verbal behaviors that corresponded to variations
in immediacy and affection ratings. A number
of vocalic cues provided the greatest influence
on relational communication, followed by a
group of specific kinesic behaviors; the confederates’
verbal behaviors had no significant influence
on perceptions of their immediacy and
affection. In contrast, in the CMC transcripts,
several specific verbal behaviors bore significant
association with differences in relational communication.
No less variance was accounted for
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——459
by the verbal cues in CMC than the nonverbal
cues accounted for in face-to-face interaction.
This research provides confirmation about the
hypothetical process mechanisms of the SIP theory,
beyond confirmation of a relationship
between distal antecedents and consequents.
The theory is somewhat equivocal about the
second major element, the temporal dimension.
The primary theoretical explanation for the
additional time CMC requires for impression
development and relational management is that
electronic streams of verbal communication
without nonverbal accompaniments contain less
information than multimodal face-to-face
exchanges. Even in so-called real-time CMC, chat
communication cues are not fully duplexed in
terms of seeing a partner’s reactions at the same
time that they generate an utterance. From this
perspective, even a constant and uninterrupted
exchange of real-time CMC should provide a
relatively smaller accumulation of interpersonal
information than would face-to-face communication
over the same time interval. However,
discussions of the theory also reflect that more
time may be needed for relational effects to
accrue in CMC because CMC is generally used
in a more sporadic manner than face-to-face
communication. Online communication often
involves asynchronous media, that is, systems
that allow one communicator to create a message
at one time and recipients to obtain it later at a
point in time they choose. The SIP perspective
can account for both approaches to temporal
distortion theoretically, and both approaches
have been used in empirical research: Recent
studies have added support for SIP by using
strictly asynchronous communication (Peter,
Valkenburg, & Schouten, 2005; Ramirez, Zhang,
McGrew, & Lin, 2007) or real-time chat episodes
repeated over several consecutive days (Hian,
Chuan, Trevor, & Detenber, 2004; Wilson, Straus,
& McEvily, 2006). However, greater theoretical
precision would enhance understanding of the
theory’s scope and application.
The SIP theory has been expanded by researchers
other than its original developer to incorporate
media other than text-based CMC, although
these formulations are tentative. Tanis and
Postmes (2003) established that the presentation
of partners’ photos or the exchange of preinteraction
biographies of CMC users works
equivalently well in instilling interpersonal expectations
in CMC settings. Previously, SIP research
had been more oriented to verbal exchanges, such
as CMC users’ biographical disclosures, attitudinal
statements, and style. Therefore, it is noteworthy
that photographic information appears to
function similarly as biographical text.
Westerman, Van Der Heide, Klein, and Walther
(2008) offered a more sophisticated approach to
the potential effects of photos and other multimedia
information online within SIP framework.
These researchers reconsidered SIP’s root proposition
that lesser bandwidth media transmit less
information per exchange than do greater bandwidth
media, affecting the rate of impression
formation and relational development. They
examined various forms and channels of personal
information from this perspective. As a result,
they argued that some mediated forms of information
are faster (i.e., they transmit more social
information in a respective time interval, e.g.,
photos or videos) and others are slower. This
simple assertion is consistent with SIP; yet an
expanded view of faster and slower media allows
for greater scope and a wider range of predictions
about new, multimodal media than the theory
was originally conceived to explain.
Despite these potential adjustments with
which to integrate visual information in the SIP
framework, recent studies have demonstrated
considerably limited additional effects on attraction
and uncertainty reduction when additional
modalities accompany text-based CMC. In one
study, Antheunis, Valkenburg, and Peter (2007)
compared face-to-face dyadic communication
with an instant messaging system, and a hybrid
instant messenger that displayed visual information
about a dyadic partner alongside textual CMC.
After a get-to-know-you session, no significant
differences in interpersonal attraction arose
between these conditions. Visual cues actually
460——PART IV: Processes and Functions
increased the frequency of disclosures and personal
questions, in contrast to previous findings
that disclosure and personal questions were proportionately
more frequent in CMC than in faceto-face
interactions (Tidwell & Walther, 2002).
Finally, a recent examination of uncertainty
reduction processes via social network sites
focused explicitly on the potential obsolescence
of SIP theory in light of new media characteristics
providing information aside from the interactive
exchanges on which SIP traditionally
focuses. Another study by Antheunis, Valkenburg,
and Peter (2010) argued that social network sites
provide an abundance of asynchronous and
unintrusive biographical, multimodal (pictorial),
and sociometric information about other
people. Therefore, they predicted that these
alternative forms of social information should
be expected to be the primary sources of uncertainty
reduction about others, without need of
recourse to interactive communication via text.
Results of the study showed that despite the
appeal of these newer forms of information display,
interactive communication contributed the
most to uncertainty reduction about another
individual.
Hyperpersonal CMC
The hyperpersonal model of CMC (Walther, 1996)
proposes a set of concurrent theoretically based
processes to explain how CMC may facilitate
impressions and relationships online that exceed
the desirability and intimacy that occur in parallel
off-line interactions. The model follows four common
components of the communication process
to address how CMC may affect cognitive and
communication processes relating to message
construction and reception: (1) effects due to
receiver processes, (2) effects among message senders,
(3) attributes of the channel, and (4) feedback
effects. The model has received a great deal of
attention in the literature. At the same time, extensions
and revisions to the model have been proposed
on the basis of both conceptual and empirical contributions.
Certain aspects of the model remain
underresearched—such as the holistic integrity of
its subcomponents as well as the reciprocal effects
of feedback—although some progress has been
made with respect to these issues.
Receivers. When receiving messages from others
in CMC, an individual may tend to exaggerate
perceptions of the message sender. In the absence
of the physical and other cues that face-to-face
encounters provide, rather than fail to form an
impression, receivers fill in the blanks with regard
to missing information. This often takes the form
of idealization if the initial clues about another
person are favorable. The original articulation of
the model drew explicitly on SIDE theory (Lea &
Spears, 1992) in formulating receiver dynamics.
The SIDE model also describes how CMC users
make overattributions of similarity when communicating
under conditions of visual anonymity
if contextual cues suggest that a conversational
partner shares some salient social identity with
the receiver. It further proposes that communicators
experience heightened attraction in these
circumstances. The SIDE model argues that the
specific form of attraction is focused on one’s
attachment to the group identity rather than to
the individual person.
Recent rearticulations of the hyperpersonal
model, however, have attempted to broaden the
concepts related to receiver dynamics (see Walther,
2006). The hyperpersonal approach now suggests
that an initial impression may be activated not
only by group identifications but through individual
stereotypes, such as personality characteristics,
or due to the vague resemblance of an
online partner to a previously known individual
(see Jacobson, 1999). Analysis of online impressions
using social relations analysis (Kenny, 1994),
which assesses how uniform or differentiated
one’s impressions of other group members are,
offers a promising approach to the question of
group- or interpersonally based impressions in
CMC (see Markey & Wells, 2002).
Senders. Text-based CMC facilitates selective selfpresentation.
Online, one may transmit only cues
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——461
that an individual desires others to have. It need
not be apparent to others what one’s physical
characteristics are (unless one discloses them
verbally), nor do individuals generally transmit
unconscious undesirable interaction behaviors
such as interruptions, mismanaged eye contact,
or nonverbal disfluencies of the kind that detract
from desired impressions face-to-face. Instead,
CMC senders may construct messages that portray
themselves in preferential ways, emphasizing
desirable characteristics and communicating in a
manner that invites preferential reactions. Selfdisclosure
quite naturally plays a role in this
process, by which individuals not only disclose
what content they wish to be known but also,
through disclosure, breed intimacy. Research has
found that disclosure and personal questions
constitute greater proportions of utterances in
online discussions among strangers than they do
in comparable face-to-face discussion (Joinson,
2001; Tidwell & Walther, 2002). This may be a
simple adaptation to the lack of nonverbal
expressive behavior, which would normally provide
uncertainty-reducing information. Yet CMC
users’ disclosures are more intimate than those of
face-to-face counterparts, suggesting a strategic
aspect to this difference as well.
Apart from explicit disclosures, much of what
senders selectively self-present is conveyed
through the content of the exchanges in terms of
how communicators express their evaluations of
various subjects, their agreement with partners,
word choice, and any number of ordinary expressions
of affinity. A recent study (Walther, Van Der
Heide, Tong, Carr, & Atkin, 2010) asked one
member of an online dyad, who was about to
discuss the topic of hamburgers with an online
partner, to behave online in a way that prompted
the other person to like or to dislike the individual.
The significant differences in liking for the
actor following the CMC conversation were associated
with the actor’s level of agreements versus
disagreements and concurrence versus divergence
in statements about the other partner’s
favorite hamburger. Online (and perhaps elsewhere),
we manipulate our desirability to others
not so much by overt statements of interpersonal
affect but through the way we complement or
contest others’ views of things in the world. In other
research, systematic differences among individuals’
construction of stories about themselves
online led to changes in their self-perceptions.
Gonzales and Hancock (2008) asked participants
to write about their experiences in a manner that
would lead others to perceive them as either
extraverted or introverted. Half of the participants
in the experiment posted these responses
in a blog, presumably accessible to other CMC
users, whereas the other half of the participants
recorded their answers in a private document for
ostensible analysis at a later time, anonymously.
The blog writers generated significantly different
self-perceived extraversion/introversion scores
following the experience, in accordance with the
characteristic they had been assigned. Gonzales
and Hancock concluded that selective selfpresentation
online provides a potent influence
not only on others but also on the transformation
of an individual’s self, a phenomenon they
called “identity shift.”
Channel. The third dimension of the hyperpersonal
model involves characteristics of the channel
and how CMC as a medium contributes to
the deliberate construction of favorable online
messages. One part of the channel factor focuses
on the mechanics of the CMC interface, suggesting
that users exploit the ability to take time to
contemplate and construct messages mindfully.
In many CMC applications (especially asynchronous
systems), users may take some time to
create optimally desirable messages without
interfering with conversational flow, very much
unlike the effects of face-to-face response latencies.
The hyperpersonal model further suggests
that CMC users capitalize on the ability to edit,
delete, and rewrite messages to make them reflect
intended effects before sending them. The introduction
of the model further suggested that
CMC users may redirect cognitive resources into
enhancing one’s messages, without the need to
pay attention to the physical behaviors of one’s
462——PART IV: Processes and Functions
conversational partner or oneself, or to the ambient
elements where one is physically located
when communicating (in contrast to these
demands on attention in face-to-face conversations).
CMC users can focus their attention on
message construction to a greater extent than
they would in face-to-face conversations.
Recent research supported a number of these
suggestions (Walther, 2007). A study led college
student participants to believe that they were
joining an asynchronous discussion with a prestigious
professor, who was described in much
detail; with a relatively undesirable high school
student in another state, also described in detail;
or with another college student, about whom no
details were provided except for the student’s
name. Participants’ message composition was
recorded in real time and later coded and rated,
and a different group of participants provided
ratings of how desirable each type of target
would be as an interaction partner. Results of the
study revealed that the more desirable the partner
was, the more editing (deletions, backspaces,
and insertions) the participants exercised in
composing their messages to that partner. The
degree of editing corresponded to the degree of
relational affection ascribed to the messages by
raters. Participants self-reported their level of
mindfulness during message production, which
had been expected to differ based on the attractiveness
of the ostensible message target. It did
not, and neither did the time they spent composing
their messages differ as a result of the different
types of targets. However, those who were
more mindful spent more of their time editing
the messages they had written, whereas those
who were lower in mindfulness spent more time
choosing what to write. These results add a level
of verification to the model’s contention that
CMC users exploit the unique mechanical features
of the medium to enhance relational qualities
of their messages.
Another facet of the channel component of
the hyperpersonal model has been more difficult
to interpret, and research results have challenged the
model’s original assertions about asynchronous
versus synchronous CMC. The model originally
posited that asynchronous CMC allowed users to
avoid the problems of entrainment associated
with face-to-face meetings. Entrainment, in the
small group communication literature (Kelly &
McGrath, 1985), refers to the ability to synchronize
attention and interaction with collaborators.
It is proposed to be difficult to accomplish when
participants have competing demands on their
time and attention. Time pressures work against
entrainment in face-to-face meetings, leading
communicators to neglect group maintenance
behaviors in favor of impersonal, task-related
discussions. Since CMC users working asynchronously
can interact with others at times that are
convenient and available to them, the model suggested
that CMC should not suffer from a lack of
maintenance behavior. CMC users would be
more likely to engage in off-task, interpersonal
discussions than in face-to-face meetings since,
without meeting in real time, there is no time
pressure constraining such exchanges.
This aspect of the model was challenged very
quickly. Roberts, Smith, and Pollock’s (1996) ethnographic
observations and interviews reflected
that individuals who enter real-time, multiplayer
online games and chat systems (as opposed to
asynchronous discussions) very rapidly exhibit
sociable exchanges. Likewise, Peña and Hancock
(2006) demonstrated that the conversations in
a real-time multiparty sword-fighting game
reflected more socio-emotional utterances than
game-related statements even during online
duels. The sociability benefits originally ascribed
to asynchronous CMC in the introduction of the
model are fairly clearly an aspect of many synchronous
systems as well, at least those in which
socializing is a goal that users bring to the system.
A recent review of communication that takes
place in certain online, real-time, role-playing
games describes a great proportion and a wide
variety of interpersonal communication behaviors
among associates and fellow “clan” members
(Klimmt & Hartmann, 2008). Although these
findings suggest greater scope for the development
of hyperpersonal dynamics, the entrainment
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——463
explanation has not been tested since the model
was developed, and the conceptual and empirical
status of this aspect of the channel component of
the model is unclear.
Feedback. The hyperpersonal model of CMC
suggested that the enhancements provided by
idealization, selective self-presentation, and
channel effects reciprocally influenced matters,
forming a feedback system by which the CMC
intensified and magnified the dynamics that each
component of the model contributes. That is,
when a receiver gets a selectively self-presented
message and idealizes its source, that individual
may respond in a way that reciprocates and reinforces
the partially modified personae, reproducing,
enhancing, and potentially exaggerating
them. The manner in which the dynamics of
these reciprocated expectations may modify participants’
character was suggested to reflect the
process of behavioral confirmation.
Behavioral confirmation (Snyder, Tanke, &
Berscheid, 1977) describes how one interaction
partner’s impression about a target partner leads
the first partner to behave and how that behavior
alters the responses of the target partner in
return. The original behavioral confirmation
study involved male participants who were
shown photos priming them to believe that their
upcoming female telephone interaction partners
were physically attractive or unattractive (even
though the actual partners were not really those
depicted in the photos but were randomly
selected female participants). Not only did this
expectation affect the males’ involvement, it
affected the females’ personality-related responses
as well, as revealed in outside raters’ evaluations
of the females’ personalities based on audio
recordings of their conversations. The hyperpersonal
model appropriated this construct, suggesting
that one’s idealized impressions of an
online partner may lead a CMC user to reciprocate
based on that impression, transmitting messages
that, in turn, may shape the partner’s
responses, shifting the target’s personality in
the direction of the communicators’ mutually
constructed and enacted impression. In this way,
feedback may intensify the hyperpersonal effects
of idealization, selective self-presentation, and
channel exploitation.
The feedback component of the hyperpersonal
model has received little formal research attention
until recently. One study (Walther, Liang, et al.,
2011) examined whether feedback to a CMC
communicator enhanced the identity shift phenomenon
described by Gonzales and Hancock
(2008; see above). As Gonzales and Hancock had
done, this experiment called on half the participants
to answer several questions as if they were
extraverted and the other half, as if introverted.
Participants posted their responses to a blog or
pasted them into a Web-based form. Departing
from Gonzales and Hancock, in each condition,
participants either did or did not receive feedback
confirming their (extraverted or introverted) personality
performances. When participants subsequently
completed self-report measures of their
extraversion/introversion, those who received
feedback expressed more extreme scores in the
direction of the initial prompting. This study
also helps establish a link between two components
of the hyperpersonal model—selective selfpresentation
and feedback—showing that the
activation of these components jointly produces
stronger effects than in isolation.
Several CMC studies have generated findings
consistent with a behavioral disconfirmation
effect (see Ickes, Patterson, Rajecki, & Tanford,
1982; Burgoon & Le Poire, 1993). Behavioral
disconfirmation takes place when one individual
anticipates an unpleasant interaction with a target
person and, to avert the unpleasantness, overaccommodates
in order to improve the person’s
demeanor. One was the Walther (2007) study
described above, in which participants anticipated
online communication with a high school–
age loner, a college student, or a professor.
Despite pretest indications that the high schoolers
were the least desired communication partners,
male participants who believed that they
were communicating with a male high schooler
expressed greater editing and affection than with
464——PART IV: Processes and Functions
a male peer or professor. No voice-based or faceto-face
comparisons were done in that study.
As discussed earlier, two recent studies
explored the effects of preinteraction expectancies
on subsequent impressions following CMC
or voice-based communication (Epley & Kruger,
2005; Walther, DeAndrea, & Tong, 2010).
Manipulations in both studies instilled preinteraction
expectancies among interviewers regarding
their partners’ high or low intelligence.
Manipulations in both studies involved the bogus
presentation of one of two sets of a partner’s
ostensible photograph, grade point average,
major, and self-reported greatest high school
achievement. In Epley and Kruger’s (2005)
research, half the interviewers used a phonelike
system to speak to a real interviewee, and half the
interviewers used CMC to obtain responses that
were transcribed from a person other than the
actual interviewee. The results superficially
appear to reflect greater behavioral confirmation
in CMC than on the phone: Interviewers’ posttest
assessments of interviewees’ intelligence were
different in CMC but not in voice conditions.
The methodology in that study, however, was
such that the CMC interviewer could not actually
have influenced his or her partner’s behavior.
Walther, DeAndrea, and Tong’s (2010) replication
involved actual interviewees in both voice
and CMC conditions. The post-CMC ratings
indicated relatively greater intelligence assessments
than did those following the voice-based
interviews, reflecting behavioral disconfirmation
in CMC relative to voice. Further research is
exploring the reasons for these voice versus CMC
differences in confirmation and disconfirmation.
Extensions. In addition to research that has added,
supported, or challenged the hyperpersonal model’s
claims, a variety of extensions to the model
have been made, and it has been applied to new
social technologies as well.
Research exploring the dynamics of online
date-finding systems has applied aspects of the
hyperpersonal model in several ways. Many of
these systems require users to create profiles that
feature photos and self-descriptions. Ellison,
Heino, and Gibbs’s (2006) interviews with online
daters revealed that users make overattributions
from minimal cues that prospective dates exhibit.
These include gross inferences based on spelling
errors and projections about individuals’ character
on the basis of what time of day or night he or she
initiates a date request. Gibbs, Ellison, and Heino
(2006) also drew on selective self-presentation
principles in their documentation of the dilemmas
faced by daters when honest self-presentations
produce fewer dates than do self-aggrandizing or
deceptive self-presentations (see also Whitty, 2008).
Research on deceptive self-presentation in
online dating profiles has made particular use of
the hyperpersonal model. Innovatively acquired
data demonstrate that most online daters misrepresent
their age, weight, and/or height online
(Toma et al., 2008; see also Hall, Park, Song, &
Cody, 2010). In several cases, these findings have
been attributed to CMC’s facility for selective
self-presentation and editing under asynchronous
communication conditions (Toma et al.,
2008). This hyperpersonal perspective has most
recently been applied to the manner in which
dating system users select or retouch the photographs
they post to their electronic profiles
(Hancock & Toma, 2009).
Additional work has added new explanatory
extensions to the model. Jiang, Bazarova, and
Hancock (2011) developed a framework for
understanding the exceptional impact of selfdisclosure
on intimacy in CMC compared with
face-to-face communication. Although individuals
disclose proportionately more, and more
intimately, in CMC than in face-to-face communication
(Tidwell & Walther, 2002), questions
remained over whether receivers (over) interpret
disclosures in a way that increases intimacy in
CMC more intensively than in off-line interactions.
Jiang et al. (2011) hypothesized that the
degree to which receiving disclosure from a conversational
partner affects intimacy is shaped by
the attributions a receiver makes for the partner’s
motivation to disclose. A 2 × 2 experiment included
CMC chat versus face-to-face interactions between
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——465
a naive participant and a confederate who offered
several personal disclosures in one condition and
no disclosures in a control condition. Posttest
measures revealed that the CMC participants
receiving disclosures experienced greater intimacy
than did face-to-face participants. Among
those who were exposed to a greater degree of
disclosure, the CMC participants more frequently
perceived that the discloser’s behavior
was motivated by some aspect of their relationship
rather than by the medium or the discloser’s
disposition, compared with the face-to-face participants.
The type of attribution fully mediated
the relationship between the disclosure-bymedium
interaction and intimacy. In addition to
documenting a hyperpersonal effect of disclosure
on intimacy, this study provided a new attributional
mechanism to explain the effect, which is
also affected by the medium.
A self-attribution dynamic may also be operating
online that leads to exaggerated intimacy as
a result of online self-disclosure, a hypothesis
that has not appeared in the literature previously.
Although it is commonly understood that when
another person discloses to us, we experience
intimacy with that person, Collins and Miller’s
(1994) meta-analysis of the relationship between
disclosure and liking demonstrates an alternative
connection as well: When we disclose to another
person, our own disclosure increases our feelings
of intimacy toward the recipient. Thus, when
users naturally adapt to the absence of nonverbal
cues in CMC by disclosing proportionately more
than they do in face-to-face interaction (Joinson,
2001; Tidwell & Walther, 2002), it may be due to
their own expression of relatively greater disclosure
(in addition to or instead of the reception of
others’ disclosures) that they attribute greater
intimacy to disclosive CMC conversations.
Although this contention warrants empirical
verification, it suggests an interesting contribution
to the hyperpersonal cycle.
Another form of self-perception affecting
intimacy can be hypothesized on the basis of
findings that it takes several times longer to have
a conversation online than exchanging the same
amount of verbal content in a face-to-face meeting
(see Tidwell & Walther, 2002). If CMC chatters
have an online conversation that feels as
though it should only have taken an hour but
turns out to have taken four hours, and if the
communication rate differential is not apparent
to CMC interactants (as it is apparently unapparent
to online game players; Rau, Peng, & Yang,
2006), this temporal distortion may also lead to
exaggerated inferences about the desirability of
the online partner. When time seems to pass
more quickly than it actually does, people attribute
enjoyment to the events that occurred during
that time (Sackett, Nelson, Meyvis, Converse,
& Sackett, 2009).
Other researchers have also examined the role
of disclosures in the development of relatively
more intimate relations online and their effects.
Valkenburg and Peter (2009) identify three relationships
among four specific processes that
explain how CMC may be related to improvements
in adolescents’ well-being. For reasons that
have appeared in the literature (see above; for a
review Kim & Dindia, 2011; see also Schouten,
Valkenburg, & Peter, 2007), the first important
relationship in the model is the effect of CMC in
promoting online self-disclosure. Drawing on
extensive literature, Valkenburg and Peter (2009)
proceed to connect self-disclosure with the development
of higher quality relationships among
people. Finally, the authors point out the connection
between high-quality relationships and
development of psychological well-being. The
first two linkages in particular implicate CMC as
a catalyst in the relationally-based development
of adolescent adjustment.
In contrast to Valkenburg and Peter’s depiction
of the beneficial effects of CMC to wellbeing,
another application of the hyperpersonal
model is seen in Caplan’s (2003) approach to the
study of problematic Internet use. Caplan focuses
on the usage and consequences of CMC by individuals
who have social skill deficits in their
face-to-face communication abilities and who
experience disruptive communication-related
anxieties. To such people, Caplan has shown that
466——PART IV: Processes and Functions
Internet interaction is especially appealing, particularly
real-time discussion systems. Because
CMC provides individuals greater control over
their messages and their self-presentation, it
reduces anxiety (see also Amichai-Hamburger,
2007). Under these conditions, individuals may
develop what Caplan (2005) refers to as a preference
for online social interaction, “characterized
by beliefs that one is safer, more efficacious,
more confident, and more comfortable with
online interpersonal interactions and relationships
than with traditional (face-to-face) social
activities” (p. 723). This use of CMC is paradoxical
and problematic, according to Caplan’s
research, because such individuals experience a
decline in their off-line social skills in conjunction
with their more socially rewarding online
interactions.
Warranting
A new theoretical construct, known as the warranting
construct, was introduced in the previous
edition of the Handbook of Interpersonal Communication
(Walther & Parks, 2002). Warranting
pertains to the perceived legitimacy and validity
of information about another person that one
may receive or observe online. Individuals often
come to learn quite a lot about each other
through discussions in topical online discussion
groups or through online role-playing games
(see Parks & Floyd, 1996; Parks & Roberts, 1998),
as well as from personal homepages and other
forms of online interaction and self-presentation,
including online dating sites (see Ellison et al.,
2006). However, as Donath (1999) explained, it is
widely suspected that the information one
obtains through interaction in such venues leaves
open the possibility for distorted self-presentations
and outright deception with respect to participants’
off-line characteristics. As a relationship
develops online, there may come a point at which
it becomes very important to interactants to have
information that they believe reliably describes a
partner’s off-line characteristics. This may become
especially acute if they decide to initiate an offline
meeting, as many online friends and prospective
romantic partners decide to do (Parks &
Roberts, 1998).
The introduction of the warranting construct
argued that an individual is less likely to distort
his or her self-presentation when the receiver has
access to other members of the sender’s social
circle, since others can corroborate the individual’s
real-life characteristics and hold that person
accountable for misrepresentation. To increase a
partner’s confidence in one’s self-descriptions, an
individual may make efforts to put an online
partner in touch with members of the individual’s
off-line network.
The greater value of the warranting construct is
found in its definition of what kind of information
provides more confidence to receivers about the
potentially true nature of an individual’s off-line
self. From this perspective, receivers are expected to
be more confident about their impressions based
on information that is more likely to warrant, or
connect, the online persona to the off-line body
and person (see Stone, 1995). Information is more
likely to be seen as truthful to a receiver to the
extent that the receiver perceives it to be “immune
to manipulation by the person to whom it refers,”
according to Walther and Parks (2002, p. 552).
They argued that CMC users may take deliberate
steps to provide online partners with information
having relatively great warranting value by using
links to individuals in one’s social network or
hyperlinks to websites or archives containing information
about the user over which the user himself
or herself has no control.
Recent research has provided several empirical
tests of the warranting construct. Although
warranting was originally conceptualized in the
context of relationships originating in text-based
online discussions, recent research has applied
and extended the construct to contemporary
multimedia websites in interesting ways. The first
reference to warranting came in a study of
impression management in online dating sites.
Ellison et al. (2006) reported that online date
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——467
seekers warrant their claims about their proclivities
or participation in certain activities by
including photographs on their user profiles that
depict them engaged in the activity they are
claiming. Showing oneself rock climbing, for
instance, would be difficult to manipulate or
manufacture if it was not an individual’s actual
activity (see Donath, 1999, and below). Other
research from an online dating context (Toma
et al., 2008) found that individuals who used
online date-finding services distorted their online
self-presentation to a lesser extent the more their
off-line acquaintances knew they were using
these services. Similarly, Warkentin et al. (2010)
investigated whether individuals’ displays of
information that could be used to hold them to
account for self-presentations affected the frequency
and degree of deception they displayed
with respect to their claims about demographic
characteristics and personal tastes and preferences.
Although chat systems featured more
deception than was present in social network
profiles and e-mail, the presence of cues to offline
identity in any of these platforms reduced
the level of deception in that medium, according
to Warkentin et al.
Walther, Van Der Heide, Hamel, and Shulman
(2009) tested warranting experimentally by juxtaposing
flattering versus unflattering statements
about an individual on mock-up Facebook profiles.
The comments were made to appear to have
been posted by the profile owner or by the owner’s
Facebook friends. Facebook provides a format
in which an individual can indicate qualities
about himself or herself via “about me” descriptions,
favorite quotations, current activities, and
so on and where one’s acquaintances can also
post comments reflecting the activities and characteristics
of the profile host via postings on the
host’s “wall” (and other commenting systems).
When individuals’ suggestions about their own
physical attractiveness (either positive and selfpromoting
or negative and self-denigrating)
were contradicted by the cues contained in wall
postings from friends, observers’ ratings of the
profile owner significantly reflected the friends’
comments more than the profile owner’s selfclaims.
A replication focusing on profile owners
and friends’ assessments of an individual’s extraversion
provided more ambiguous results. In
related research, an experiment that varied only
the coefficients representing the number of
friends a Facebook profile owner appeared to
have found a curvilinear relationship between
the number of one’s friends and the observers’
ratings of the profile owner’s popularity and
social attractiveness (Tong, Van Der Heide,
Langwell, & Walther, 2008). Although the sociometric
friend coefficient did not contradict any
particular self-generated claim of the profile
owner, its effect nevertheless reinforces the influential
nature of online information about a user
that is beyond the immediate reach of the user to
manipulate. A similar study by Utz (2010) examined
observers’ ratings of a profile owner’s popularity
and social attractiveness via the Dutch
Hyves social network site. Profile mock-ups
reflected variations in self-claims for extraversion,
the photographically depicted extraversion
of nine of one’s friends, and the number of
friends a profile owner had. An interaction effect
between the number of friends and the apparent
extraversion of friends significantly affected the
social attractiveness ratings of the profile owner.
The warranting principle remains a relatively
new construct at this time, although its empirical
application in contemporary multimedia systems
suggests that it is likely to see additional
rather than decreased use. Concerns about the
legitimacy of others’ online self-presentations
has been a pernicious issue related to CMC since
before the widespread diffusion of the Internet
(see Van Gelder, 1985), and sensationalistic
accounts of identity deception and manipulation
still attract headlines (Labi, 2007). Likewise, as
systems for meeting new friends and lovers shift
from the casual discussion site to purposive
online dating sites, concerns about others’ online
authenticity continues (Lawson & Leck, 2006).
Theoretical structures that help explain how
468——PART IV: Processes and Functions
CMC users assess the veridicality of others’
online self-presentations may increase in value.
Efficiency Framework
A new framework was developed to resolve previously
contradictory findings about satisfaction
with, and the effectiveness of, CMC collaboration.
Its investigation has incorporated very novel
CMC technologies and has implicated presence
as a mediating factor.
The framework’s developers, Nowak, Watt, and
Walther (2005, 2009), noted that many studies of
CMC generated relatively low ratings on interpersonal
satisfaction and related notions (typically in
field experiments or surveys) compared with ratings
of face-to-face communication or video communication.
Although researchers are frequently
aware of the known linkage between interpersonal
cohesiveness and productivity or quality, many of
the same studies in which CMC earned lower
sociability ratings found no deleterious effects of
CMC on task accomplishment. For example,
Galagher and Kraut (1994) found that text-based
CMC groups were less satisfied with their communication
than video-mediated groups but that
there were no significant differences in the quality
of the outputs that these conditions produced.
Research assessing CMC often relies on measurements
of its subjective appeal and does not consider
its instrumental utility for communicative
tasks independently.
Nowak et al. (2009) argue that users are likely
to conflate their impressions of CMC’s presence
and satisfaction with their estimates of its utility.
Enjoyment or frustration responses override an
individual’s objective assessment of effectiveness,
and individuals may be expected to dislike CMC
when there are easier alternatives (see Korzenny’s,
1978, electronic propinquity theory, described
above). People are cognitive and behavioral
misers, as Nowak et al. (2009) note, and prefer to
do a task using less effort than using more effort.
Compared with face-to-face communication,
CMC is more effortful. Face-to-face communication
is intuitive and provides rapid exchange of
information through multiple modalities. Drawing
on SIP theory, CMC may be just as capable as
face-to-face interaction in achieving task and
social outcomes, but it requires more time and
effort, which are inherently less desirable in most
cases than doing things in an easier way. There is
a natural efficiency to face-to-face communication
that is often satisfying.
Satisfaction and utility may be unrelated,
however, or even inversely related, depending on
the task. When people collaborate on writing
something together, for instance, talk is only
useful to a point. In contrast, if collaborators
plan, organize, and execute a writing task via the
written (and stored and editable) medium of
CMC, it may provide a greater efficiency in the
long run, since things have been made recorded,
retrievable, and reusable in a way that speech is
not. This process is not less effortful than talk.
Greater effort, however, in addition to being
frustrating, may lead to better outcomes. In this
way, the efficiency framework attempts to
explain how, within and across studies, CMC
may be rated as socially unsatisfactory but, nevertheless,
may offer instrumental benefits. To
evaluate CMC on an affective basis alone, which
is common, may be misleading from a utilitarian
perspective.
Empirical research on the efficiency framework
has been extremely limited. One study involved
small groups collaborating on the preparation of
presentations for five weeks, using face-to-face
meetings, text-based real-time chats at specific
times, asynchronous text-based conferencing,
real-time videoconferencing, or an asynchronous
video communication system that allowed members
to record, leave, and play multimodal messages
to and from one another (Nowak et al.,
2009). Consistent with previous research and
the efficiency framework’s predictions, selfadministered
questionnaires showed higher scores
on presence and conversational involvement for
face-to-face communication above all other conditions.
A greater number of cue systems also
led to greater subjective project quality and satisfaction,
as did synchronous (compared with
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——469
asynchronous) media. With respect to the objective
quality of their projects, however, external
coders’ ratings identified the asynchronous video
condition as having facilitated the best actual
work, with no other differences between conditions.
Real-time versus asynchronous comparisons
did not affect the quality of the work.
Although this perspective seems especially
suited for the study of mediated collaborations,
its central lessons may apply to a variety of
interpersonal as well as instrumental settings as
media characteristics evolve: Those media that
are the easiest to use may not, in fact, offer
the greatest instrumental benefit. As interface
options increase and become more natural,
more research will be needed that separates
affective reactions from those pertaining to
interaction goals. In strictly recreational social
settings, these two aspects—social and purposive
outcomes—may be isomorphic. As new
electronic media such as avatar-based systems
and desktop video are employed for an increasing
number of activities, including the common
instrumentalities that make up so much of the
maintenance of ongoing relationships, whether
easier is better or not, will deserve continued
reexamination.
ICT Succession
Perhaps the most recent new framework about
CMC is Stephens’s (2007) prescriptive formulation
involving the strategic sequencing of messages
across multiple communication channels.
This approach recognizes different forms of
information and communication technologies
(ICTs), including traditional media, face-to-face
channels, and newer forms of CMC. It primarily
concerns how combinations of ICTs predict
communication effectiveness in organizational
communication, although it includes predictions
related to the use of the media for “tasks that are
personal and social in nature” (p. 499).
In terms of its structure, the ICT succession
model presents several propositions inferred by
the author from principles and findings in a wide
variety of literatures, rather than deriving them
from a set of related higher order constructs. The
major theoretical terms of the model can be
identified as (a) successive (vs. single) message
transmissions and (b) complementary (vs. singular)
channel usage. The central proposition of the
model is that the repetition of a message through
two different types of communication channels
causes the greatest communication effectiveness
and efficiency (for certain types of tasks). For
example, a message sent once face-to-face might
be followed up by e-mail, or vice versa, which
should be more effective than repeating messages
using a single medium (or no repetitions at all).
Among these terms and relationships, singular
versus successive messaging is easily defined:
A communicator may send a message once or
send it more than once. The definition of complementary
modalities is less clear. The model
reflects a variety of different approaches to identify
groupings of channels based on criteria
found in other CMC theories as well as in perceptual
studies of media uses and gratifications
(Flanagin & Metzger, 2001), rather than on the
basis of some underlying functional property. It
clusters channels into the following groups: faceto-face,
mass media, oral media, or textual media.
Although a proposition refers to “maximizing
modalities through complementary successive
ICT use” (Stephens, 2007, p. 496), the theory
does not indicate what kind of combinations
among different ICT groups would be optimally
complementary. It may be that the use of two
nominally different ICTs constitutes sufficient
complementarity, although later propositions
address the superiority of mass media as an initial
medium and elsewhere the benefit of textbased
media for subsequent messages.
The ICT succession model received mixed
empirical support in a recent experiment
(Stephens & Rains, 2011). Research confederates
either e-mailed a persuasive message to participants
encouraging them to use the career services
center at their universities or read the message
face-to-face to the participant. A few minutes
later, based on the experimental condition, one
470——PART IV: Processes and Functions
of several events transpired: (a) a confederate
then communicated a second message, with different
content, that also advocated using the
career services center, using either the same
channel (e-mail or face-to-face) as the first message
or the other of the two channels, or (b) a
confederate provided a message about a different
topic using one or other of the media combinations.
This experimental design allowed the
researchers to examine the influence of media
succession on outcomes independently of the
effect of the simple addition of more persuasive
arguments. Results revealed significantly greater
intention to use the career services center when
messages were conveyed using complementary
successive messages than when other message/
media combinations were used, although attitudes
(rather than intentions), information
effectiveness perceptions, and recall did not differ
among the conditions as predicted. Complementary
media effects overrode the simple
effects of being exposed to multiple messages.
In one sense, the ICT succession theory offers
a modest digital-age update and elaboration to
conventional suggestions. As Koehler, Anatol,
and Applbaum wrote in their 1976 organizational
communication textbook, “We suggest
that a combination of oral and written (printed)
media are more effective in achieving employee
understanding than either oral or written messages
alone” (p. 204). The initial empirical
research compared two media that are rather
conventional by current standards, and despite
the Stephens and Rains (2011) article’s title
alluding to interpersonal interaction, no interpersonal
processes per se seem to have been
involved. Nevertheless, other aspects of the
researchers’ discussion of the model offer a
glimpse at research to come that may expand the
scope of the predictions beyond conventional
wisdom or first-generation Internet applications.
When the authors point out that “ICTs such as
mobile phones, e-mail, text messaging, and
instant messaging have made it increasingly possible
to communicate repeated messages over
time” (p. 102), they open the door to the discovery
of media selection strategies that may go well
beyond choices based on differences in the number
of code systems supported by different media.
How communication partners may choose
among many more options than simply just written
versus oral ones may be an interesting focus
of inquiry and illuminate much about communicators’
literacies, opportunities, effort economies,
and communication strategies. These issues will
bear repeated attention across both organizational
and relational contexts such as the development
of friendships, courtship, maintenance,
conflict, and perhaps relational dissolution. The
issue of multimodality is addressed more fully
below, after some other concluding observations.
Challenges to CMC Research
This review ends with some notes of concern
about current trends in CMC research. These
concerns focus on three issues: (1) the increasing
neglect of off-line comparisons in CMC studies,
potentially undermining broad theoretical
understanding and leading to potentially inflated
views of CMC’s effects; (2) how and whether new
technologies affect the utility of theories that
were developed in the context of somewhat older
technological contexts; and (3) how we study
interpersonal communication when many relationships
are radically multimodal.
There appears to be an increasing tendency for
CMC research to focus on different features and
different users of CMC and not to make comparisons
with face-to-face communication or communication
using other traditional media. This trend
is supported by different disciplinary orientations
about what questions should concern us and by the
development of research tools that make CMC
much easier to analyze than its off-line counterpart.
For a number of years, many researchers have
extolled the end of the face-to-face “gold standard”
for CMC research (for a review, see Nardi &
Whittaker, 2002), meaning that online behavior
itself is a legitimate and significant focus of study
and that descriptions of it, or comparisons of different
interfaces or users, are sufficiently interesting
without having to compare observations of online
Chapter 14: Computer-Mediated Communication and Interpersonal Relations——471
to off-line behavior. Technology design research,
for example, may largely be uninformed by what
happens off-line, since its focus is on the discovery
of technology users’ needs and preferences and the
evaluation of technology features that optimally
address those criteria.
Additionally, there has been significant growth
in the development of low-cost computer programs
that provide powerful analyses of digitally
represented behavior. In particular, language
analysis programs that can be applied to large
corpuses of digital texts have made online behavior
more amenable to analysis and made textual
analysis far less onerous than it previously was.
The ease, cost, availability, and power of these
applications make them very appealing. At the
same time, their availability may privilege analysis
of the kind of digital primary data to which
the programs are especially well suited and facilitate
disregard for the analysis of analog face-toface
interaction recordings, which require
significant resources to transcribe and/or prepare
for digital analysis.
These factors, as well as others, may be promoting
the analysis of online interpersonal
behavior more frequently and of off-line behavior
less so. Although to many of us the dynamics
of organic online behavior are often quite interesting,
the lack of comparison with off-line
behaviors has the potential to lead to artificial
conclusions. We may infer support using native
digital sources for theoretically universal effects
when the effects are limited. We may likewise
conclude that certain behaviors are primarily or
exclusively the result of various qualities of
media, but without comparison with off-line
behavior that may exhibit similar patterns, such
conclusions may be fallacious and misleading.
Second, questions arise whether new technologies
should lead us to retire theories that
were developed in light of other, older technologies.
Good ways to ask these questions examine
the boundary conditions and scope of extant
theories. We should always assess how the topography
of new technologies’ features meet or
violate the assumptions of a theory. As discussed
above, theories that were premised on the lack of
visual information about one’s partners may not
hold as much utility for multimedia interfaces.
At the same time, advances in technologyenabled
social arrangements allow us to see if
theories can stretch their original assumptive
boundaries. Human and Lane (2008), for
instance, have appropriated elements of electronic
propinquity theory and the hyperpersonal
model to try to account for the idealization
that emerges through the online communication
that takes place between the occasional face-toface
meetings of geographically separated offline
relational partners. Exploring the degree to
which the processes implicated in older models
may be reconfigured for newer media presents
intriguing possibilities (as is demonstrably the
case with electronic propinquity theory). To the
extent that the older media’s boundary conditions
continue to appear within other, newer
systems, the vitality of the theories remains even
if the scope of their application declines. When
multimedia news stories or videos appear in a
Web 2.0 application but are accompanied by
user-generated comments appearing as anonymous,
plain-text messages, for example, theories
premised on unimodal media and focused on
anonymity remain quite potent with respect to
the effects of the comments.
Finally, just as the previous Handbook suggested
that relationships may develop through
multiple modalities (Walther & Parks, 2002),
many researchers have come to suggest that interpersonal
communication research must explicitly
recognize that contemporary relationships are
not conducted through one medium or another
but often through a great variety of channels.
Multimodality has become the primary channel
characteristic of interpersonal relationships:
We conduct our relationships face-to-face,
over the phone, and online through modes
as diverse as e-mail, instant messaging,
social network friending, personal messages,
comments, shared participation in
discussion forums and online games, and
the sharing of digital photos, music, and
videos. (Baym, 2009, p. 721)
472——PART IV: Processes and Functions
Research has yet to conceptualize what this means
for the study of relationships, except by reference to
media ecologies (e.g., Barnes, 2009), the implications
of which are not yet clear beyond phenomenological
levels. Even advocates of a multimodal
perspective at times do no more than survey individuals
about the use of all their Internet and
mobile applications and enter their total new technology
use as one undifferentiated predictor variable
comparing new technology, old media, and
face-to-face interaction on relational outcomes of
some kind. In contrast, other researchers have
advanced good questions based on established
theories applied to new media to describe and
explain the disappointing effects of moving a new
relationship from online to off-line and back (e.g.,
Ramirez & Wang, 2008; Ramirez & Zhang, 2007).
We will need new theoretical concepts with
which to describe the functional attributes of
groups of technologies. Qualities such as the
opportunistic availability of different media (e.g.,
texting or mobile-enabled microblogging) may
be such a concept. Economy of effort may be a
useful property with which to describe social
media that allow one to contribute to the maintenance
of numerous relationships with a single
message. Knowing which applications provide
asymmetrical interpersonal information-seeking
(I can Google you without you knowing it) or
symmetrical requirements (You have to grant me
access to your Facebook profile before you can
see mine) may be a useful frame, depending on
the theoretical questions these phenomena
arouse. It is also likely that different media are
used in functional, strategic sequences (beyond
repetition) that may illuminate relational patterns.
Our chapter in the previous Handbook
quoted Mitchell (1995): “Hacker lore has it that
burgeoning cyberspace romances progress
through broadening bandwidth and multiplying
modalities—from exchange of e-mail to phone
and photo, then taking the big step of going
(face-to-face), then climbing into bed” (p. 19).
Lore aside, technology sequences and their relational
significance deserve an update: If a man
takes an interest in a woman he sees in a class, he
may want to scan the Web for information about
her. If that search suggests potential reward, he
may talk to her to establish a minimal basis of
familiarity so that he can request access to her
social network profile and be able to see how
many friends she has, what they look like, what
their comments have to say about her, and how
she interacts with them in turn. If results are
encouraging, a face-to-face conversation may
come next, followed by a reinforcing e-mail or
social network posting. Do increases in channel
access signify relational escalation? Do we meet
new partners’ Flickr family photo collection
before we meet the parents, and why? Rather
than resign ourselves to undifferentiated, massive
multimodality, future research may begin to contemplate
the strategic and interpersonal signification
possibilities it presents as its users exploit
the vast relational potentials of CMC.
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