Abstract

Social science and humanities view computermediated communication (CMC) as a hub for information dissemination. The development and diffusion of CMC can be divided into three phases: pre-Internet CMC (beginning in the 1980), Internet-focused CMC (roughly 1994 to date) and social-software-supported CMC (beginning around 2002). Email, online collaborative learning, and blogs (representing, respectively, pre-Internet, Internet-focused, and socialsoftware- supported CMC) are three modes frequently studied in assessing asynchronous CMC. The current stage of CMC (social-software supported CMC) provides opportunities for research to investigate artifacts in newer domains such as YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr.