This dissertation examines the “buffer effect,” an important but understudied feature of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Research on the buffer effect posits that CMC venues provide a buffering “screen” that users can literally and figuratively hide behind. The buffer can make people feel more comfortable during interactions, and is theorized to be especially relevant in contexts where self-presentation is threatened. This study employs transgressions as ideal sites for examining the buffer effect because of the high level of threatened self-presentation involved therein. The current project tests whether people perceive different levels of a buffer in different channels of communication, and how the buffer effect is related to other widely studied features of CMC, such as interactivity, synchronicity, and social presence. It also tests outcomes of the buffer effect for both senders and receivers of transgressive messages. Specifically, it posits that the buffer effect is beneficial to senders of transgressive messages, and is detrimental to receivers of those messages. Furthermore, in the context of transgressions, the amount of responsibility that a person takes for the transgression is a factor that influences how others perceive the situation. Therefore, the current study also considers receivers' perceptions of the level of responsibility the sender accepts, and specifically posits that senders' higher levels of responsibility are associated with positive outcomes for receivers. The dissertation is comprised of two studies. In Study One, participants responded to a survey to test their perceptions of the buffer effect and of other features of CMC in various channels. Participants also responded to a hypothetical situation to indicate how the buffer effect influences outcomes when sending a transgressive message. Study Two employed an experimental procedure to test how senders and receivers perceive the buffer effect in actual interactions, as well as how senders' acceptance of responsibility affects outcomes for receivers. Half of the participants were assigned the role of sender and were trained to provide a transgressive message to the receiver. Specifically, senders were trained to say that they had to leave the experiment early without completing the study, rendering the receiver ineligible for course credit. Both the channel (i.e., face-to-face, instant messaging, text messaging) and the senders' level of responsibility (i.e., low/high) were manipulated. Results suggested that the buffer effect manifests in different levels for various channels of communication, such that face-to-face environments provide the lowest buffer, followed by video chat, social networking sites, instant messaging, and email. Text messaging provides the highest buffer. The buffer effect is negatively related to other features of CMC (i.e., synchronicity, interactivity, and social presence) for low-buffer channels, and is either positively or not significantly related to these features in high-buffer channels. Results also suggest that the buffer effect is associated with benefits for senders in both hypothetical and actual interactions, but does not affect receivers' outcomes. Receivers' perceptions of the level of responsibility that senders accept affects receivers' outcomes, but only within environments with a low and moderate buffer. These results extend research on CMC and on transgressive communication. Results also offer practical implications for how people might elect to use channels and modify the content of their message when communicating a transgression to a friend.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre and Dance / Timothy R. Steffensmeier / Social Identity Theory has long held that group affiliation plays a predominant role in how we interact with others and the types of communication strategies that we deploy. Traditional scholarship on Computer Mediated Communication maintains an excessively interpersonal focus, detracting from its ability to theorize intergroup communication and conflict. This research study, conducted at the Internet bulletin board Americanwx.com, investigates the role that group identity plays in the everyday discourse of online message boards. In an ethnographic study spanning the course of 8 months and thousands of exchanges, research found that the structure of message boards themselves is implicated in the formation and maintenance of groups, and that once formed, groups tend to act in a manner that is consistent with Social Identity Theory.

In his Essay "On Face-Work" Erving Goffman identifies the rules for a number of face-to-face interaction rituals. Among these rituals are two ways of correcting participants within an interaction. The first correction ritual, the interchange, allows offending interactants a chance to save face. The second ritual, the points making game, is a way for interactants to cause other participants to lose face. This thesis analyzes the content of a random sample of blogs to see if the rituals described above are employed in online interaction, specifically looking at blogs and how the context of the rituals is modified, including whether and how they are modified. It was found that the ritual of the interchange was modified. The ritual of the points making game though left unmodified occurred with greater frequency.

Thesis advisor: Ted Gaiser / This study explores the alteration of gossip as a result of new technology. Specifically, this study examines the social implications of Facebook, a popular social networking website, on college students using the Boston College undergraduate population as a lens to study the college student population in general. Drawing from the theories of Simmel, Mead, and Goffman, and others, I outline how college students present themselves on Facebook’s online environment. I employed a mixed-method research approach, collecting data from a survey of Boston College undergraduates and, subsequently, conducting a series of in-depth face-to-face interviews in order to gain an understanding of how Facebook altered the social scene and, specifically, how Facebook affects gossip. Facebook is a communication tool widely used by college students in order to present themselves online and maintain relationships. I found that due to the pervasive nature of Facebook, in junction with the simplicity of posting information about oneself and others on Facebook, an important shift occurs in which private matters are publicized to a large audience. This shift facilitates the flow of gossip amongst college students. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology Honors Program. / Discipline: Sociology.

This thesis investigates the design and use of communication technologies to support long distance dating relationships (LDDRs). We focus on using co-located behaviours that hold special relational meaning as the metaphor behind the design of devices to mediate between separated partners. Social Presence is used as the main theoretical construct through which support for LDDRs is addressed. Social Presence is a phenomenological concept which refers to “the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationship” [Short et al., 1976, p. 65]. An additional concept, Closeness, is also brought in to the design problem to account for the supportive role of communication technologies between moments of synchronous contact. This thesis proposes three main arguments. The first is that individual acts of communication, through feelings of Social Presence, have an impact on a couple’s feelings of Closeness towards one another. We explore possible connections between Social Presence and Closeness through a diary study. The results of the diary study also establish that the selection of communication media impacts feelings of Social Presence. Our second argument is that a number of design facets, explored throughout the thesis, could enhance the design of communication technologies for LDDRs by increasing feelings of Social Presence. An analysis of current literature informs the development of seven prototype devices based on hand-holding, hugging, sharing notes and pillow talk. Two interview studies explore people’s reactions to these devices. The findings from these studies are integrated into a design space which describes some of the design decisions that should be considered when creating behaviour-based devices which aim to support LDDRs. Our third argument is that devices based on co-located behaviours support LDDRs through engendering high levels of SP. This is investigated through five case studies using the devices we previously developed, showing that three of our devices are associated with particularly high levels of SP. They also provide insights about the design space facets, as realised in the devices, through using the devices within couples’ existing communication routines. The thesis concludes with a discussion of how the results of these studies are of relevance to researchers interested in supporting long distance dating relationships. Our investigation into Social Presence provides two main contributions; firstly it offers an understanding of how various factors (including relationship type and distance) affect feelings of SP. Secondly, it demonstrates that increasing feelings of Social Presence can have a longer-term impact on LDDRs through increasing their feelings of Closeness towards one another. This suggests that SP is suitable concept to try and support through the design of communication technologies. In addition to informing our discussion of our design space, the case studies within this thesis highlight that devices based on co-located behaviours can help support LDDRs. Given the dearth of devices based on this metaphor, we suggest that other researchers may be interested in extending these findings by exploring other behavioural metaphors. The design space proposed within this thesis offers two main contributions. Firstly, designers can use the design space to foster innovation when creating new designs. Design spaces result in a descriptive and exploratory tool for designers creating new innovations. Secondly, the comprehensive consideration of the various dimensions, especially regarding our consideration of existing communication technologies, provides researchers with a novel design-centric view over the state of the art.

The Internet represents an abundant source material for linguistic research, which continues to pose new challenges and opportunities on how language is used by its speakers. Its personal naming system, for example, has remained largely unexplored. Of the many facets of names on the Internet awaiting closer scrutiny, the phenomenon of usernames is perhaps the most fundamental. This thesis investigates the role they play in online life, the most suitable methods to approach them, and how they compare with the names used offline and where their place is in onomastics in general. With people’s names inevitably connected with one or another aspect of identity, this work focuses on the relationship between usernames and online identities. The data has been gathered from a forum on the Russian-speaking sector of the Internet (RuNet) and comprises all registered usernames (676 at the time of collection) as well as an extensive and methodically selected sample of users’ conversations. As a general analytical framework, it utilises Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology, which conceptualises identity as a result of the ongoing interaction that people negotiate and achieve in everyday life rather than a set of inherent inner qualities. More specifically, the following methodological tools devised by Sacks (e.g. 1995, 1984a, 1984b) have been used to perform the analysis: Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to categorise the usernames of the forum participants, and Conversation Analysis (CA), to observe how usernames contribute to the construction of individual identities. Finally, the concept of Stance, as presented by Du Bois (2007), has been used as a lens to identify relevant evidence in the conversation samples. The analysis has demonstrated the need for a systematic categorisation of usernames. The way in which they associate sets of attributes, facilitates the allocation of named entities as members of certain categories of persons. Both linguistic and typographic elements of usernames contribute to how they are perceived and what impression they create. It is also argued that usernames have an important role to play in the active and ongoing construction of individual identities. The study concludes that CMC participants operate their usernames as meaningful linguistic devices to construct and co-construct each other’s identities. CA and MCD are confirmed to be relevant methods to analyse onomastic data. This study has generated a reliable body of evidence for the assertion that usernames are far from meaningless, and demonstrates, moreover, how their meanings are established. In so doing, it constitutes an important contribution to onomastic theory with the potential to shed new light on personal naming in general.

This dissertation examines the “buffer effect,” an important but understudied feature of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Research on the buffer effect posits that CMC venues provide a buffering “screen” that users can literally and figuratively hide behind. The buffer can make people feel more comfortable during interactions, and is theorized to be especially relevant in contexts where self-presentation is threatened. This study employs transgressions as ideal sites for examining the buffer effect because of the high level of threatened self-presentation involved therein. The current project tests whether people perceive different levels of a buffer in different channels of communication, and how the buffer effect is related to other widely studied features of CMC, such as interactivity, synchronicity, and social presence. It also tests outcomes of the buffer effect for both senders and receivers of transgressive messages. Specifically, it posits that the buffer effect is beneficial to senders of transgressive messages, and is detrimental to receivers of those messages. Furthermore, in the context of transgressions, the amount of responsibility that a person takes for the transgression is a factor that influences how others perceive the situation. Therefore, the current study also considers receivers' perceptions of the level of responsibility the sender accepts, and specifically posits that senders' higher levels of responsibility are associated with positive outcomes for receivers. The dissertation is comprised of two studies. In Study One, participants responded to a survey to test their perceptions of the buffer effect and of other features of CMC in various channels. Participants also responded to a hypothetical situation to indicate how the buffer effect influences outcomes when sending a transgressive message. Study Two employed an experimental procedure to test how senders and receivers perceive the buffer effect in actual interactions, as well as how senders' acceptance of responsibility affects outcomes for receivers. Half of the participants were assigned the role of sender and were trained to provide a transgressive message to the receiver. Specifically, senders were trained to say that they had to leave the experiment early without completing the study, rendering the receiver ineligible for course credit. Both the channel (i.e., face-to-face, instant messaging, text messaging) and the senders' level of responsibility (i.e., low/high) were manipulated. Results suggested that the buffer effect manifests in different levels for various channels of communication, such that face-to-face environments provide the lowest buffer, followed by video chat, social networking sites, instant messaging, and email. Text messaging provides the highest buffer. The buffer effect is negatively related to other features of CMC (i.e., synchronicity, interactivity, and social presence) for low-buffer channels, and is either positively or not significantly related to these features in high-buffer channels. Results also suggest that the buffer effect is associated with benefits for senders in both hypothetical and actual interactions, but does not affect receivers' outcomes. Receivers' perceptions of the level of responsibility that senders accept affects receivers' outcomes, but only within environments with a low and moderate buffer. These results extend research on CMC and on transgressive communication. Results also offer practical implications for how people might elect to use channels and modify the content of their message when communicating a transgression to a friend.

This exploratory case study aims to develop a set of best practices for integrating online discussion forums into the foreign language curriculum, focusing specifically on a group of learners in an advanced French grammar course at a large, public U.S. university. During a period of two months, 26 participants completed a series of tasks designed to provide three different types of data: 1) exploration and analysis of interactional, linguistic, and social features of Web forum discourse; 2) participation in Web forums; and 3) feedback from students. Since the feedback received from two questionnaires was ultimately the most consistent and reliable type of data collected, this study focuses on students' participation patterns and their perceptions of Web forums as a communication space having the potential to provide opportunities for learning French. Although some students indicated that they would neither consider visiting a French-language Web forum nor actually visit one, in both cases, more than half of the participants who completed these questionnaires indicated that they would both consider visiting a French-language Web forum and might actually visit one. Since encouraging students to use French beyond the classroom and to engage in the lifelong use of French for personal enrichment (following the Communities standard of the U.S. Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century), at least one goal of this study-the main goal-has been partially achieved.

This is a study of language choice and language alternation patterns in a corpus of messages posted on two Brunei Darussalam on-line discussion forums. It aims to break new ground by investigating Malay-English language alternation in the context of computer-mediated communication (CMC), in contrast to previous research which has mostly studied alternation or code-switching in informal conversations. The corpus of texts consists of 21 1 messages posted on the 'Bruclass' and 'Brudirect' forums. These were analysed in terms of their grammatical and discoursal features to determine what role is played by each of the contributing languages. Chapter 1 outlines the major research questions: how much alternation is there between Malay and English, how is this alternation achieved, and why do the bilingual text producers make these language choices when posting their messages in the on-line forums? This chapter also includes outline description of the sociolinguistic context of Brunei Darussalam in terms of its population, history, system of education, and discussion of the varieties of Malay and of English used by Bruneians. In Chapter 2 relevant literature on language alternation is reviewed, with a gradual narrowing of the focus: from theories of code-switching and language alternation to studies dealing specifically with Malay-English code-switching in Malaysia and in Brunei Darussalam. Studies on language use and alternation in the CMC domain are also reviewed. Chapter 3 discusses the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, and the rationale for these. Findings from the grammatical and discoursal analyses are reported and discussed in Chapter 4. Whilst monolingual English messages are the most frequent, almost half of the corpus texts are found to include a measure of Malay-English alternation. / Many of these display an asymmetric alternation pattern, in which one language supplies the grammar and the other the lexis, but there are also examples of equal alternation, where Malay and English both contribute to the grammar and to the lexis. The reasons for these choices are investigated through a questionnaire survey, which includes a text ranking task, and through other published texts in which Bruneians discuss their use of language. Chapter 5 discusses these findings, and the concluding Chapter 6 considers connections between the analysis of the texts and the questionnaire survey, especially the preference for monolingual English. Chapter 6 also includes discussion of questions of identity as reflected in the language choices and of language use in the CMC domain.

This study examines three popular theories of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and how they relate to increased modes of interactivity. The research takes place in a highly interactive virtual world called "There." A total of 18 participants took part in the study. Using participant-observation and in-depth interviews, the study found that all three perspectives manifested themselves in both the reported and observed behavior. The three perspectives examined are the social information processing theory (SIPT), the social identity model of de-individuation effects (SIDE), and the hyperpersonal perspective. The study found that SIPT and the hyperpersonal perspective did the best job at explaining the observed behavior, although many factors of the SIDE model also helped.