Let me begin by apologizing to my father for not changing the title of
my paper. You see, Dad and I had some heated debates about the words "synchronous"
and "asynchronous." Electronics engineers like him use these terms to describe
schemes for transmitting data among telecommunications equipment. With
all due respect to Dad, I'm concerned with communication among people,
not equipment, so I won't elaborate on those engineering definitions, but
I'll be happy to give you Dad's email address if you want the details.
Suffice it to say, Dad's meanings are not the ones I had in mind. What
I had in mind is this.
Synchronous communication happens in what is often called "real time,"
when participants communicate with each other simultaneously. This involves
being together in time (regardless of time zone), or, to use a fancier
phrase, being temporally co-present. Asynchronous communication, on the
other hand, does not take place in real time; participants do not communicate
simultaneously. Rather, they communicate at different times, and are not
temporally co-present. Hence the "A" in asynchronous: not synchronized
or simultaneous.
Some examples are in order. We're probably most familiar with asynchronous
CMC on the Internet like email, or listserv mailing lists, or Usenet newsgroups,
which grew out of earlier asynchronous activities like bulletin boards
and discussion forums on private networks such as CompuServe, the WELL,
and ECHO. Less familiar, perhaps, are synchronous systems for real time
conversation among individuals and groups, such as the Internet Relay Chat
(known as "IRC") or America OnLine's infamous chat rooms. Text-based MUDs
(that is, Multi User Dungeons or Domains) and MOOs (which are object-oriented
MUDs) combine synchronous chat with role playing, as well as props and
scenery. Some synchronous chats incorporate graphics, such as The Palace
and Fujitsu's Habitat, where users appear on screen as images called "avatars,"
interacting with graphical props and scenery as well as typing to each
other. The latest developments in synchronous CMC provide real time audio,
video, and text conferencing. Synchronous multimedia systems such as these
include IPhone, CU-SeeMe, and ICQ, to name just a few.
Discussions of CMC systems abound in both scholarly and popular literature.
But beyond identifying their object of study as happening in real time
or, as Lance Strate puts it, in "delayed time" (1996, p. 360), most authors
don't say much about the differences between synchronous and asynchronous
CMC. As Strate explains in a 1996 article entitled
Cybertime,
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"whereas the concept of cyberspace has proven to be both popular and powerful,
the idea of cybertime has been all but ignored. Consequently, we tend to
stress the similarities between computer technology and more traditional
notions of physical place; we view computer media as a where, not a when."
(p.
352)
So my plea here is that we attend a little more to the "when" and especially
to the different types of "when" involved in synchronous versus asynchronous
CMC.
Memorex notwithstanding, whether our messages are live or recorded makes
a big difference in the nature of our communications. We have abundant
evidence of this from our experience with speech versus writing, orality
versus literacy. And so it is with synchronous versus asynchronous CMC.
Temporal co-presence is at the heart of what makes chat so different from
email. That timing is of the essence should surprise no one, since time
has long been recognized as a critical factor in human communication and
culture, as noted in Edward Hall's widely known 1959 classic, The Silent
Language, and also in a widely unknown book, Eviatar Zerubavel's 1981
Hidden
Rhythms. (By the way, I say widely unknown because even Lance Strate
doesn't mention it. I promised myself I would plug Zerubavel's marvelous
book if I ever got the chance. But back to temporal co-presence...) Temporal
co-presence or the lack thereof is a salient characteristic of any communication
situation; it's one of the fundamental conditions of attendance in communication.
I'm arguing, essentially, that we should look more closely at temporal
co-presence. By examining the timing involved in synchronous versus asynchronous
CMC, we may gain fresh insights about many aspects of these new modes of
communication.
For the rest of my discussion, I'd like to offer two observations based
on the research I'm doing for my doctoral dissertation about IRC. My remarks
apply specifically to this synchronous text-only system, but I hope they
may stimulate ideas about other kinds of CMC. Also, despite the fact that
all synchronous systems share with IRC the characteristic of temporal co-presence,
those with multimedia capabilities have vastly different conditions of
attendance with respect to things other than time (for example, participants
being able to see and hear each other, rather than just read and write).
But as for IRC and the implications of temporal co-presence, here are my
two observations.
First, temporal co-presence intensifies on-line interactions. In fact,
I'll risk speculating that synchronous CMC produces more confrontations
than asynchronous CMC. My guess is that the heightened sense of immediacy
in chat leads to more emotion, more heated exchanges, and more kinds of
misbehavior than in asynchronous CMC systems, which have built-in delays
that allow tempers to simmer down. You've heard of flaming in email and
newsgroups. Well, let me introduce you to a couple of IRC war techniques,
flooding and nuking. Flooding involves sending too much data too quickly
to somebody on IRC, so that the victim gets disconnected. Flooding is annoying,
but it's old-hat and there are painless ways to protect against it. This
past year brought the debut of nuking, a collection of techniques for exploiting
bugs in computer operating systems by sending defective data over the Internet,
which completely freeze or lock up victims' computers, forcing them to
reboot, and often causing them to lose unsaved data. Protection against
nuking is more complicated than against flooding. It's becoming fashionable
to develop new types of nukes, and new varieties come out every day. I'm
often the target of nuking, sometimes called "DOS attacks" (as in Denial
of Service), and I'm racking up frequent surfer bytes at the Microsoft
website, downloading software patches every week to correct the bugs these
attacks exploit.
My second and final observation is that synchronous text-based chats like
IRC resemble conversation far more than do asynchronous CMC like email:
IRC is more oral than literate, although it's written, not spoken. I think
the synchronous nature of on-line chat gives it a conversational flavor,
exactly because the exchanges involve such immediacy. As in speech, there's
limited time for reflection, although on IRC you can scroll back up your
screen to review what you missed, an advantage I often long for in face-to-face
or phone conversation. Further supporting the notion that IRC is conversational
is the high incidence of phatic communication among IRC users, typical
of speech, not of writing. I don't know about you, but I can't remember
the last time I sent or received an email saying "yeah, go on" or "gee"
or "hmm," yet such messages occur frequently on IRC. In closing, let me
suggest that as synchronous multimedia CMC systems evolve, real time audio
and video conferencing will seem even more like conversation than text-based
chat already does today, and CMC will move closer to the realm of orality.
Thank you for your attention and especially for your time.
References
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Hall, E. T. (1959). The silent language. New York: Anchor Press.
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Strate, L. (1996). Cybertime. In L. Strate, R. Jacobson, & S. B. Gibson
(Eds.), Communication and cyberspace: Social interaction in an electronic
environment (pp. 351-377). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
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Zerubavel, E. (1981). Hidden rhythms: Schedules and calendars in social
life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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