International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Communication in today's world is mediated by technologies in a multiplicity of ways. Telephones and mobile phones are integrated into the very cultures of sociability and personal connectivity, especially in large-scale industrialized societies where contacts and relationships are maintained across significant distances. Hopper (1992) characterized such populations as “people of the phone” in an attempt to encapsulate the extent to which telephone conversation is relied upon and even actively sought after, as persons are prone to abandon almost any other activity in order to answer the telephone's summons. Increasingly, too, Internet message exchange systems are coming to play a pivotal role in everyday sociability networks, in the light of growing accessibility of computer hardware and software, burgeoning of technological sophistication, especially among the younger population, and expansion of broadband connectivity linking home computers to the Internet. In a wider sense, the interface between ordinary people and the professional spheres of politics, finance, education, health, and so on operates more and more via technological mediation: for example, television and radio news and interview broadcasts, automated inquiry systems, web-based information gateways, and interactive electronic devices of numerous types. In the world of work (particularly white-collar work), communication ... log in or subscribe to read full text