STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
COLLEGE AT OSWEGO

Department of Communication Studies

Proposed Syllabus

Mediated Interpersonal Communication

A student will be able to:

1. Describe a range of interpersonal communication media.
2. Identify the component parts of an interpersonal medium and explain how, organized in a particular way, they can enable Interpersonal Communication.
3. Summarize the characteristics of a medium of communication and evaluate the things they suggest about a medium's uses.
4. Compare media based on their characteristics.
5. Recognize and describe the uses, effects, and practices normally associated with a medium.
6. Identify the rules, roles, norms, and enforcement mechanisms associated with an interpersonal medium.
7. Discuss generic and systemic change within a medium of communication and the ways in which a medium is evolved by its users.
8. Examine an interpersonal media ecology and analyze the ways in which people use different interpersonal media together and in support of each other.
9. Assess the role of mediated interpersonal media in social and organizational contexts like long distance relationships and distributed workplaces.

1. The range of mediated interpersonal media. Media studied might include the telephone, C.B. radio, family radio, e-mail, computer conferences, teleconferences, videoconferences, groupware, instant messenger, internet relay chat, cooperative composition pages, and interactive games and simulations.
2. Construction materials for mediated interpersonal systems. Materials examined within the context of one or more media might include human modalities, user interface components, networks and broadcast channels, memory, filters, amplifiers, and routers.
3. The characteristisics of media. Classes of characteristics explored might include transmission and feedback, storage, characteristic participants, participant characteristics, message, performance, and production characteristics, and characteristic mediators.
4. Characteristic-based comparison of media. The dimensions of media. General categories of media. The value of such comparisons.
5. The uses and social effects of interpersonal media use. Practices associated with interpersonal media. Perspectives used to explore uses, effects, and practices in media may include, but are not restricted to, uses and gratifications, medium theory, genre theory, critical theory, and cultural theory.
6. Social structures and constraints associated with interpersonal media. Why media have norms, roles, formal and informal rules, mechanisms of enforcement, and other social structures and constraints. How these structures and constraints are negotiated and enforced.
7. The invention and evolution of media. The processes of systemic and generic change in media. How users reinvent interpersonal media in using them.
8. The varieties of interpersonal media ecology. The parallel use of multiple interpersonal media. Using interpersonal media in support of each other.
9. The social implications of mediated interpersonal communications. Social contexts examined may include relationship formation, long distance relationships, distributed communities, telecommuting, distributed work environments, and the "global village", among others.

Methods of instruction will include some combination of lecture, discussion, small group collaboration and reports, hands on use of technologically mediated communication systems, individual research, papers, and examinations.

1. Individual research assignments, including a term paper.
2. One or more group projects.
3. Examinations.

The student will be evaluated using some combination of examinations, individual research, and group projects as follows:

1. A variety of individual research assignments will be assigned across some subset of the course objectives. In some cases the only "evaluation" of assignments will be of timely completion. Others may entail an evaluation of the correctness of the results. The term paper, and perhaps other assignments, will be evaluated on a combination of organization, research quality, synthesis of class and research materials, writing quality, and ability to present the materials in an engaging manner.
2. Group projects will be structured, in general, to explore two or more course objectives in combination. So long as groups appear to function well, group projects will be evaluated for the group as a whole based on the quality of the group research, their synthesis of the material, and their presentation of the results. Where groups do not appear to function well, individual participation and contribution may also contribute to the evaluation.
3. Examinations will test students on their mastery of readings, lecture materials, and other classroom materials that pertains to course objectives. Evaluation of examiniation results will be consistent with normal educational practice.

Bibliography (if not italicized, available from Penfield library or across the internet):

• Adams, Tyrone and Clark, Norman. (2001). The Internet: Effective Online Communication. New York: Harcourt.
• Bolter, J. David and Grusin, Richard. (1999). Remediation: understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Brook, James. (1995). Resisting the virtual life :the culture and politics of information. San Francisco : City Lights.
• Burstein, Daniel and Kline, David (1995). Road warriors : dreams and nightmares along the information highway. New York : Dutton, 1995.
• Dery, Mark. (1996). Escape velocity :cyberculture at the end of the century. New York : Grove Press.
• Dyson, Esther. (1997). Release 2.0: a design for living in the digital age. New York: Broadway Books.
• Forester, Tom. (1989). Computers in the human context: information technology, productivity, and people. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.
• Foulger, Davis. (1990). Medium as Process: The Structure, Use, and Practice of Computer Conferencing on IBM's IBMPC Computer Conferencing Facility. Hypermedia publication: http://evolutionarymedia.com/mediumAsProcess.
• Friedman, Batya. (1997). Human values and the design of computer technology. Stanford, Calif. : CSLI Publications.
• Gackenbach, Jayne. (1998). Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications. New York: Academic Press.
• Gates, Bill. (1995). The road ahead. New York : Viking
• Grossman, Wendy. (1997). Net.wars. New York: New York University Press.
• Gumpert, Gary and Cathcart, Robert. (1986). Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Hawkins, Robert P., Wiemann, John M., and Pingree, Suzanne. (1988). Advancing communication science: merging mass and interpersonal processes. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications.
• Heim, Michael. (1993). The metaphysics of virtual reality. New York : Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Hiltz, Roxanne Starr and Turoff, Murray. (1993). The Networked Nation: Human Communication via Computer. Boston: MIT Press.
• Hopper, Robert. (1992) Telephone Conversations.
• Hudson, Heather. (1994). When Telephones Reach the Village: The Role of Telecommunications in Rural Development. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.
• Hugill, Peter J. (1999). Global Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Jespersen, James. Mercury's web: the story of telecommunications. New York : Atheneum, 1981.
• Kieve, Jeffrey L.(1973). The electric telegraph: a social and economic history. Newton Abbot, Devon, UK: David and Charles.
• Kiesler, Sara. (1987). Computing and change on campus. New York : Cambridge University Press.
• Kiesler, Sara. (1997). Culture of the internet. Mahwah, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
• Loader, Brian D. (1997). The governance of cyberspace: politics, technology and global restructuring. New York: Routledge.
• McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York, McGraw Hill, 1964.
• McLuhan, Marshall and Powers, Bruce R. (1989). The Global Village : Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Miller, Steven E. (1996). Civilizing cyberspace: policy, power, and the information superhighway. New York, N.Y.: ACM Press.
• Mitchell, William J. (1999). E-topia: Urban life, Jim--but not as we know it. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.
• Negroponte, Nicholas. (1995). Being digital. New York: Knopf.
• Oslin, George P. (1992). The story of telecommunications Macon, Ga. : Mercer University Press.
• Owen, Bruce M. (1999). The Internet challenge to television. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Pickover, Clifford. (1992). Visions of the future :art, technology and computing in the twenty-first century. New York : St. Martin's Press.
• Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Technologies without boundaries: on telecommunications in a global age; edited by Eli M. Noam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• Rice, Ronald E. 1984). The New media: communication, research, and technology. Beverly Hills: Sage.
• Rogers, Everett M. (1986). Communication Technology: The New Media in Society. New York: The Free Press.
• Rosenberg, Richard S. (1997). The social impact of computers. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
• Salamensky, S. I. (2001). Talk talk talk :the cultural life of everyday conversation. New York : Routledge.
• Salvaggio, Jerry L. and Bryant, Jennings (ed). (1989). Media use in the information age : emerging patterns of adoption and consumer use. Hillsdale, N.J. : L. Erlbaum Associates.
• Solymar, Laszlo. (1999). Getting the Mewssage: A History of Communications. New York: Osford University Press.
• Sproull, Lee, and Kiesler, Sara. (1991). Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Boston; MIT Press.
• Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. (1996). The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Talbott, Steve. (1995). The future does not compute: transcending the machines in our midst. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates.
• Tapscott, Don. (1998). Growing up digital: the rise of the net generation. New York : McGraw-Hill.
• Turkle, Sherry. (1984). The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Turkle, Sherry. (1995). Life on the screen :identity in the age of the Internet. New York, NY : Simon & Schuster/Touchstone.
• Wallace, Patricia. (1999). The Psychology of the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Winston, Brian. (1998). Media, Technology, and Society, A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. New York: Routledge.