Electronic Emotion

Investigating a new communication medium—public computer conferencing—by separately and jointly analyzing content, the extent to which such systems can support socioemotional communication, and connectivity, communication patterns among system users indicates that computer-mediated communication systems can facilitate a moderate exchange of socioem emotional content.

Abstract

This article investigates a new communication medium—public computer conferencing—by separately and jointly analyzing two basic aspects of human communication: (1) content, the extent to which such systems can support socioemotional communication, and (2) connectivity, communication patterns among system users. Results indicate that (1) computer-mediated communication systems can facilitate a moderate exchange of socioemotional content and (2) basic network roles did not generally differ in percentage of socioemotional content. Some fundamental issues in analyzing content and networks in computer-mediated systems, such as structural equivalence versus cohesion network approaches, are discussed in light of these results.