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Joseph B. Walther Language and Communication Technology: Introduction to the Special Issue

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10.1177/0261927X04269584 ARTICLEJOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY / December 2004Walther / LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

LANGUAGE ANDCOMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

Introduction to the Special Issue

JOSEPH B. WALTHERCornell University

This article contextualizes the special issue of the journal by discussing the importance oflanguage variables in the study of communication technology. It asserts three reasons tostudy technology: to see how technology changes language use, to see how social actorsadapt to technology limitations and thereby bring into sharp focus basic social processesin human interaction, and to inform the design of technologies based on theories of lan-guage and the requirements of communication dynamics. Computer-mediated communi-cation offers special opportunities for examining language and communication theory, inthat online discourse is immune to many nonverbal communication elements that mayconfound language effects in speech. The role of language in communication technologyresearch has been cyclical,with recent research refocusing on language data as evidence ofhuman-computer interaction effects. Future research directions are suggested.

Keywords: computer-mediated communication; communication technology; Internet;language

The articles in this issue of the Journal of Language and Social Psy-chology represent the work of the International Association of Lan-guage and Social Psychology’s (IALSP) second task force, and its focuson language and new communication technology. We follow the trailforged by the prior task force, which focused on language and the socialpsychology of adolescence, the partial product of which appeared inthis journal (see Williams, 2003, and accompanying). The prior taskforce took as their mission, and did an impressive job, synthesizingfindings, summarizing issues, and laying out future research chal-lenges in the domain of adolescence and communication. Our grouphas taken a somewhat different direction.This collection contains orig-inal empirical research on some important facets of language and

384

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Special thanks are due to several individuals who provided helpfuloutside reviews during the development of some of this issue’s articles: Roger J. Kreuz(University of Memphis), Penny M. Pexman (University of Calgary), and Ronald E. Rice(University of California, Santa Barbara). We are also indebted to Natalia Bazarova ofCornell University who, working as editorial assistant, made all of us look better.

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY,Vol. 23 No. 4, December 2004 384-396DOI: 10.1177/0261927X04269584 2004 Sage Publications



technology, each one shedding light on issues that have come into focusas the Internet, related communication technologies, and prospectivenew interfaces have raised and/or answered questions about languageand communication processes. Although each of these studies providesits own introduction and makes some suggestions for future research,they do not as a group explicitly provide historical or philosophical con-text, or point to broader level issues or future directions. Therefore, inthis prefatory essay, we may consider the importance of studying lan-guage and communication technology, explore how we have done soand where it fits in the scheme of things, and identify some directionsfor continued exploration.

WHY STUDY LANGUAGEAND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY?

A common way to introduce studies of new communication technolo-gies such as computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the Inter-net is by citing statistics about the popularity and diffusion of technol-ogy-mediated phenomena. Surely, the prevalence of the Internet, atleast to those of us who were not raised using it, is phenomenal. It is anamazingly short time since few of us used e-mail, to the commonplacedisplay of Web site addresses on billboards and the sides of buses—often accompanied by little other notation—so well-ingrained has theInternet become. That name for a Web site address, “URL,” has becomepart of our language; “e-mail” is a verb now as well as a noun, and“IMing” is approaching common usage. The rapid diffusion of thesesystems, their ubiquity on college campuses, in workplaces, and inmany homes, have made it unnecessary to begin articles by predictingthat the Internet will diffuse or the user-base will grow by such-and-such a percentage, and that this makes CMC a potential area worth-while of study. Clearly, digital divides aside, we are already “there,”wherever that is.

Where “there” is, however, is a far more important issue than popu-larity, ubiquity, or projected growth. Indeed there are many activitiesin daily life, but their frequent exhibition alone does not make themworthy of study to language psychologists or other social researchers.There are of course arguments to be made about ubiquity and its cul-tural consequences (see e.g., C. Marvin, 1988; Thurlow & McKay, 2002),but these connections are more often than not left unstated. Perhapswe should discourage people from beginning articles using the popu-larity and ubiquity rationale. Then why study language and social psy-chology with respect to communication technology? For three reasons.

First, to ask how technology affects communication, language use,and the consequent processes; to see if technology imposes, alters, orchanges the nature of our conversations, and the relationships, atti-

Walther / LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 385



tudes, or outcomes that are reflected and shaped by our communica-tion transactions. Indeed, Hancock’s research on nonliteral languageand CMC does just this, in the present issue, focusing on irony, andironically finding results that conflict with the predictions of tradition-ally oriented linguistic theory. Gergle, Kraut, and Fussell’s article inthis issue also shows how language is affected by different technologi-cal interfaces, in ways that allow partners to retain some distance fromone another yet reclaim the linguistic turns that provide advantage inface-to-face collaboration.

A second reason to study language and technology takes an anti-thetical approach to the first. Rather than to explore how technologyfundamentally alters interactions and our abilities to achieve inter-action goals, we may explore how the so-called impediments of commu-nication technology are overcome by its users; how people adaptsemiotics as they move from one set of symbol systems to another, fromspeech to text. This paradigm provides us the means to discover andarticulate principles about language, psychological processes, andhuman relationships that have always been there, sometimes nascent,but now come into focus through the lens of new tools for employing,activating, displaying, and observing these dynamics. How we use lan-guage to manage conversations (as seen in Baron’s article in thisissue), to identify ourselves and others (in Herring and Martinson’sarticle in this issue), and to express immediacy (in O’Sullivan, Hunt,and Lippert’s article in this issue) are not by any means novel ques-tions, especially in this journal, although their performance in newenvironments makes more clear that they are central social processesdespite the requirements to do them in new ways.

Not long ago many scholars were pessimistic about CMC’s possiblefacilitation of such processes. Some researchers (e.g., McGrath, 1990)doubted that CMC users could create conversational coherence be-tween turns without nonverbal cues; Baron (this issue) shows thatthey do. Others argued that personal identity would be difficult to con-vey without physical appearance cues (Sproull & Kiesler, 1986), or, lib-erated from physical appearance cues, no one would wish to identifyhis or her gender, race, or categorical characteristics (e.g., Howard,1997); in contrast,Herring and Martinson (this issue) show how peopletry to signal gender, as well as how they signal their gender when try-ing not to, through language variations. Recognizing how languagealone facilitates each of these processes is a significant shift, becausesuch processes are often, in offline encounters, dominated by the non-verbal aspects of face-to-face interaction. Yet, to see so clearly for our-selves and in the lives of our colleagues, students, or children, thatacquainting, flirting, and coordinating are taking place through lan-guage alone, despite pessimism about pure text’s ability to carry it off,

386 JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY / December 2004



is strong testimony to the psychological power of language and thehumans who use it. These are lessons about being human that mightremain elusive if not brought into such dramatic distinction on theelectronic proscenium.

The third rationale for studying language and technology is thepractical one, best done when informed by theories of language andsocial interaction: How do we create, modify, or deploy new technologi-cal interfaces that allow us to pursue social goals more effectively? Wehave all witnessed the coming and going of new “killer apps” (i.e., soft-ware and hardware systems that come on the scene and promise newlevels of cool). We have already seen how multi-user real-time decisionsystems facilitate the display of spontaneous ideas or questions thatwould otherwise be lost to turn-taking requirements, and we havecome to know firsthand how asynchronous systems allow our studentsto ask us questions opportunistically, at all hours, about things thatmay not be remembered, or important, or useful, if they wait for “officehours.” New generations of word processors offer the same old spellchecker, but they now include new collaboration tools offering docu-ment sharing, commenting, and revising among social partners. E-mail programs notify us whether we have used profane words that mayoffend recipients,marking hasty missives to department chairs with somany chili peppers that they look hotter than a Thai restaurant menu.The best of these and future technologies, are not based on hot or cool,or transient insights. They are based on well-founded theoreticalunderstandings of how we use language and visual literacy,and on the-oretically oriented questions about what it is we want to do. How doeslanguage function in collaborative tasks, and what interface variablesfacilitate productive language rather than impede it? In addition to thefocus on interfaces by Gergle et al. (this issue), the article by O’Sullivanet al. (this issue) takes the “language of immediacy” into new electronicand symbolic forms, replacing nonverbal effects and complementinglanguage, with both general implications and specific application toeducational contexts.

In sum, we are asking where are we as a result of new modes for theuse of language, and from this perspective, what our individual andscholarly development on the way to this vantage point tells us aboutwhat it means to be ourselves. Equipped with the growing inqui-ries and evidence in this field, here and beyond the boundaries ofthe present collection, we address philosophical questions about thenature of the human condition, psychological questions about percep-tion and behavior, and practical questions about the system engineer-ing or the social engineering that allows us to pursue our age-old socialgoals, from finding information to finding a mate, with and withouttechnology.




PURE LANGUAGE VENUES

Of all the perspectives and disciplines to look at them, it is especiallyfitting to approach communication technology issues from a languageperspective. For one thing, the living presence of text-based CMC inour lives redresses a dirty little secret in the history of communicationinquiry: our methodological pretension that communication and lan-guage are isomorphic. Heretofore, language, in speech interactions,has been but a part of the communication complex that our researchdesires to describe. Language, in speech, is always part of a larger con-glomerate of cues, with the nonverbal repertoire keeping pace if notoutdistancing the verbal for many purposes. It is commonplace toacknowledge that nonverbal behavior is as much or more a part of thesocial meaning of face-to-face interactions as is language, and manycalls for research have urged us to think about the complementarity orthe integrations of these channels of expression (e.g., Cappella &Palmer,1990;Kendon,1983;Jones & LeBaron,2002).Yet our empiricalliterature is more likely to ignore than to observe it (cf. Walker &Trimboli, 1989; Walther, Loh, & Granka, in press). Understandably,any communication event, in all its systems, may be so complex thatmore than a partial glimpse is beyond reach (and so is the complexity oflanguage in text), and urging an integrated approach at all times iseasier than actually doing so. Nevertheless, we tend to sweep our par-tiality under the rug rather than abate it. Studies of persuasion, forinstance, that experimentally alter words and phrases or the allegedspeaker’s qualifications, in printed versions of ostensible speeches,offer a history of bona fide findings. Yet, we know that words and repu-tations are a part of a dynamic multimodal exchange, and the variancein real life accounted for by that which we can represent in words aloneis but a proportion of the variance in communicative dynamics inactual (or even contrived) speech events. This is not to say that lan-guage variations do not cause attitude change. Rather, it is to say thatface-to-face communication, being multifaceted and multimodal, ismore than either language analysis or nonverbal analysis tends tocapture from its own perspective.

Not so in the study of online influence attempts (e.g.,Guéguen,2001;Guéguen & Jacob, 2003) that are entirely language-based. E-mailusers, bulletin board writers, chat space users, and Instant Messen-gers employ language almost exclusively in their efforts, with greatfacility, and without the “noise” of physical appearance, bodily co-orientation, proxemic management, vocal pitch, cadence, and quality,and numerous other cues that are part and parcel of speech but thatare absent in the online universe. CMC, for language researchers, isthe venue in which variance unaccounted for by language variablesmay be attributed to measurement error rather than a host of unstud-




ied competing communication variables. For discourse analysts whopreviously defended the dismissal of nonverbal behavior in their anal-yses of speech, their day has arrived. There are discourses, influenceattempts, therapies, courtships, and any number of communicationevents which are bona fide language episodes in the online world. Thedirty little secret, that we studied in the language of face-to-faceencounters only a part of the communication we wished to understand,is moot in the study of new environments which L. Marvin (1995)referred as “worlds made of words.”

THE ROLE OFLANGUAGE IN CMC RESEARCH

There has been a cyclical trend in the role of language data in thetheoretical study of communication technology, even though languagedynamics are implicit in these theories. Discourse analytic research, ofcourse, has always kept language data front and center. Yet, recentgrand theories of CMC have not been supported with as muchlanguage-based evidence as they have been with other kinds of vari-ables.This may be product of the evolution of a very young field. Its ear-liest theories focused on relatively strong and direct effects of media onbehavior, and indeed, measured language behavior quite frequently.Social presence theory (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976) was appliedto CMC in tests involving Interaction Process Analysis of verbal tran-scripts (Hiltz, Johnson, & Turoff, 1986). Kiesler and colleagues(Kiesler, Siegel, & Mcguire, 1984; Siegel, Dubrovsky, Kiesler, &Mcguire, 1986; Sproull & Kiesler, 1986) coded “flaming” and otherverbal patterns to test the lack of social context cues hypothesis.Empirical research on the second generation of theories such as socialidentification/deindividuation (Lea & Spears, 1991), social infor-mation processing, (Walther, 1992), and the hyperpersonal model(Walther, 1996), however, initially manipulated social, physical, and/ortemporal antecedents that were hypothesized to prompt social cogni-tive processes within CMC, which were proposed to interact with prop-erties of technology, in order to assess users’ affective and evaluativeoutcomes. Outcomes were measured more frequently with self-reportscales, or with dimensional, evaluative measures assessing interactionrecords, than language data implicitly associated with theoreticalevents. It makes some sense to have gone that route: Earlier researchneglected contextual antecedent variables, leaving language-basedresults open to multiple interpretations. Later research focused oncontexts and outcomes, under the assumption that if gross outcomeswere not there, there would be little profit in evaluating the underlyingmechanisms such as language.




However, the field has matured. Theories that have garnered grosslevel support, or conflicts among gross findings, call on us to focus onthe microscopic and behavioral aspects of real language as the evi-dence with which to settle our questions more directly and definitively(see e.g., Postmes, Spears, & Lea, 2000; Thomson, Murachver, & Green,2001; Tidwell & Walther, 2002; Walther et al., in press). The articles inthis issue continue this important trend. They have in common theanalysis of language as data, in addressing gross-level theories thatdepend on language as their mechanism, or to settle theoretical con-flicts that can be addressed only with language data. Social presencetheory is countered with grounding theory in this issue, with lan-guage as proof. Goal-related phenomena are addressed through com-parative discourse and language data, moving beyond the descriptiveand interpretive to the more theoretical and comparative, whereasothers move from abstract outcomes to specific linguistic and symbolicmechanisms.

FUTURE RESEARCH

What are the issues that warrant future research? In one sense, thefield needs more synthesis:How is technology used,with what impacts,in multimodal, medium-shifting social life? Relationships are notsingle-channeled, despite the tendency of much of our research to con-trol, partial, and force these limitations for the purpose of study. Rela-tionships that begin in one domain—online or off—often cross to theother, either relatively permanently (e.g., when someone moves away)or many times a day (e.g., among organizational colleagues who are nottied to their desks). How a face-to-face encounter today providesgrounding for an e-mail message tomorrow should provide clues tomedia switching, a field where theories of media selection, with theirown spotty history of testability and support, will not even fit (see forreview Dennis & Kinney, 1998; Walther & Parks, 2002). Theoreticalresearch that not only takes into account but can explain and predictchannel switching will be useful to the field (e.g., Turner, Grube, &Meyers, 2001).

The field will also benefit from greater specificity in the isolationand specification of causal factors and their specific interaction effects,breaking apart the “black box” approach that Internet-related re-search frequently suffers. In deciphering the social effects of theInternet communication, it is important to remember that the ‘net isnot just about what you get, but also who you get. That is, accompany-ing the predominance of text-based communication, the social net-works presented via the Internet may differ radically from those ofoffline life. The Internet facilitates direct contact with people other-wise many degrees of separation away, and this is a terribly important




part of what makes the Internet what it is. Unfortunately, as researchmoves between experimental and survey research charting the effectsof Internet communication, the potentially distinct effects of cues ver-sus networks is frequently conflated.

For instance, much is said about the Internet being a “weak” emo-tional or psychological medium, an assertion sometimes ascribed tothe cues it fails to convey, and/or the people with whom one is likely tocommunicate, but often without distinction. The literature on Interneteffects refers to the advantages and disadvantages of communicatingwith “weak ties,”but confuses whether such ties are weak because theyare sociometrically weak (Granovetter, 1973), developmentally weakin terms of uniplexity or multiplexity of communication relationships,communicationally weak because they lack the richness of nonverbalcues, or emotionally weak because they lack “real” relationships attheir basis. Thus the attributes of technology are (or were) confounded.Some headway is being made in this regard (see e.g., Eveland, 2003).Indeed, work by Kraut et al. (1998) on the depressive effects of Internetcommunication originally reasoned that mental health declines weredue to weak communication and reduced social support via the Inter-net relative to offline interaction. These claims were reevaluated infollow-up research showing that Internet communication amongfriends and previously acquainted partners is actually beneficial,despite the cues filtered out by e-mail (Kraut et al., 2002). Specificity ofcauses as we move forward will allow us to avoid future missteps of thekind that the gold rush of Internet research has seen so far.

Technological developments, too, will bring exciting opportunitiesfor us to continue to learn about the nature of the linguistic animal.When the dream of ubiquitous computing is real (see Weiser, 1991)—when devices offering voice, text messaging, and video are equallyavailable, easy, and cheap (as they are becoming even now)—whatopportunities we will have to see which circumstances and humanneeds prompt preferences for text and the effort of typing, rather thanvoice or everything. The occasional availability of computer-integratedvideo cameras for around US$10, and their widespread non-adoption,testifies that there are affordances of language-only communicationsystems that are desirable and beneficial, and the research that clari-fies why that is—what the dynamics of text-only messaging are andwhy they are attractive—can be truly exciting.We have already discov-ered online venues that appeal precisely due to their anonymity andthe asynchronous affordances they offer to craft messages at leisureand with care, such as the phenomenally popular electronic socialsupport groups online (see Walther & Boyd, 2002).

The role of video as an addition to or substitute for CMC will con-tinue to occupy research attention, for results on the subject so far arequite mixed, despite the clarity of the findings by Gergle et al. reportedherein. The benefits of sharing electronic objects or live images of par-




ticipants most likely depend on the conversational task and the cogni-tive busyness of the participants, and text alone remains advanta-geous in some settings (Hinds, 1999; Slovacek, 2003). Gergle et al. (thisissue) focus on referential tasks. What alternative types of tasks exist,and their implications for visual support, deserves conceptual andempirical exploration. Preliminary studies combining the asynchron-ous characteristics of e-mail with the video capabilities of newer tech-nologies have already shown ironic results: The effects of video dependon the conversational involvement of the participants, and that whenthe conversation draws involvement, video is distracting (Nowak,Watt, & Walther, 2004). Sometimes less is more and more is less, but itis still unclear when.

Technology advances will also show the further interchangeabilityof technology for unaided communication behavior, allowing distantcollaborators to prosper. Nardi and Whittaker (2002) claim that infor-mation technology cannot, in principle, provide some fundamentalfacilities that face-to-face interaction does, such as providing signals ofa partner’s availability and attention, offering the foundation for affec-tive relationships, and so on. The argument may reflect what Rudner(1966) called a fallacy of “emergentism” in social science: to argue thatbecause something cannot be measured and understood now, it cannever be measured and understood.The demise of the black box of face-to-face processes, and their translation to technological systems iscoming soon, harkened by interactive human-robotic interactiondemands and other telecommunications needs. Even the “buddy list”notification that Instant Messenger transmits when a known partneris online and potentially available to chat, is one technological develop-ment that signals partner availability and potential attention (seeBaron, this issue). The interchangeability of identity and emotionalindicators, from nonverbal to language cues (as in Herring & Martin-son, this issue) or to icons and Web design features (O’Sullivan et al.,this issue) is further evidence. As technology advances, these accom-modations and substitutions will become more fluid.

What facility such fluid technologies will mean in our lives will con-tinue to be important issues for research, just as Thurlow and McKay(2003) discussed with regard to technology and adolescents in the pre-vious IALSP task force report. Research will move past the mediaeffects models that have dominated early research in CMC, in whichthe use of this or that technology has direct impacts on behaviors, out-looks, or relationships. As Thurlow and McKay seem to suggest, wemight focus not on “magic bullets” but on how our schemata for socialstructures are widened or shaped by theoretically discernable techno-logical and sociological factors. Just as the advent of hypertext and itspotential transformation of information was anticipated to bring aboutnew ways to think (Bolter, 1991), does communication accessibilityalter our conceptualizations of friendship or kinships, who our col-




leagues are, of nearness or farness? What is “going to class” when lec-tures can be viewed online any time, or when wireless laptops seem toencourage browsing as much as note-taking in the lecture hall (seeHembrooke & Gay, 2003)? Issues of multitasking in general, and thepresence of language compared to other, simultaneous stimuli, deserveexploration.

The intergroup applications of CMC and its variations offer greatpromise as well. Thorough discussions and insightful exemplars of thisburgeoning area of research are available in other publications(Postmes, Spears, Lea, & Reicher, 2000; Spears, Lea, & Postmes, 2001).The kinds of online self-presentations, accommodations, and diver-gences that are being charted among gender categories, for instance(Colley & Todd, 2002; Thomson, Murachver, & Green, 2001), call forexpansion, and communication between members of hostile ethnic ornational constituencies begs for attention: In CMC, when the turbanand the yarmulke need not be visible during interactions, can common-alities be made more salient than differences? Can relationships bebuilt a message at a time, if discussants have a third-party languageand a medium that makes that language more prominent than theidentities they otherwise appear to hold?

Finally, interpersonal goals and relational behavior of the mostmundane yet fundamental nature deserve attention, for the electronicenvironment, once again, may change how they are done or bring theminto focus by showing how individuals work through the change incodes.Research has focused on how we develop relations online;how dowe terminate them? How do people discourage contact, in a worldwhere many of us feel too accessible; through language of disaffiliationor through timing and interaction patterns? How do individuals assertdominance in a group, when the conversational environment is notamenable to “controlling the floor”? Much research has claimed thatCMC equalizes participation in groups, measuring participation fre-quency to support the claim. Yet, ascribed status interacts with par-ticipation proportions in evaluating others (Weisband, Schneider, &Connolly, 1995). The role of conventionally understood relational con-trol messages (Millar & Rogers,1976), conveyed through language,hasyet to be explored in online groups and dyads.

LIMITATIONS

As a collection, these articles show some gaps in their coverage ofthe field. For one, the range of technologies studied is limited. Newcommunication technology is a broad category, and the articles thatfollow focus only on two: synchronous CMC and synchronous video-mediated communication. They do so in several venues, some extantand some experimental. However, they do not take into account e-mail




or other asynchronous technologies, nor do they consider cell phonesand the video/photographic or simple text messaging systems that areexplosively increasing with cell phone use. Another shortfall is theabsence of contributors from outside North America. Potential partici-pants from other lands who declined, or whose current work is focusingon variables other than language, leave an unfortunate gap in thisissue. A focus on language variables was an editorial parameter that Iimposed, and as a result, for better or worse, this collection does diginto the black box of technology usage for the language variableswithin it. The hope is that the past and future contributions to thisjournal by authors whose concerns with language and technology willround out the current assembly, and that the current group ofauthors—among them a language historian, a linguist, cognitive andsocial psychologists, and communication scholars—offers at least aminimally acceptable diversity of perspectives and approaches.

In conclusion, the study of new communication technology is at itscenter the study of how language is used. It is fitting and refreshing forour association and journal to focus on these phenomena. The use oflanguage, as is well known in this association, is systematically fluidand accommodative. It changes in response to shifts in speakers, theirgoals, and their salient social identities. Language is no less accommo-dative and fluid in response to the potential interaction effects of tech-nological capacities, identities, and goals. Perhaps it is more vulnera-ble to these interaction effects than even speech is. Such notions aboutthe flexibility and capacity of language are not, in some circles of CMCresearch, even yet understood to be true. In other circles, they havebecome commonplace understandings. The precise questions of howthis fluidity and accommodation of language manifest themselves viacommunication technology—how they are prompted by it, modified byit, or robust to it in personal and professional settings—are, in fact, thequestions of the day.

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Joseph B.Walther (Ph.D.,University of Arizona) is a professor of communication atCornell University. His research focuses on the use of communication cues inthe management of relationships and their products, with special emphasis oncomputer-mediated communication in personal, social, and collaborative worksettings.




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