Journal of Language and Social Psychology

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Language and Communication Technology: Introduction to the Special Issue

Joseph B. Walther
Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2004; 23; 384
DOI: 10.1177/0261927X04269584
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http://jls.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/4/384

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ARTICLE

10.1177/0261927X04269584
JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY / December 2004
Walther / LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

LANGUAGE AND
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
Introduction to the Special Issue
JOSEPH B. WALTHER

Cornell University

This article contextualizes the special issue of the journal by discussing the importance of
language variables in the study of communication technology. It asserts three reasons to
study technology: to see how technology changes language use, to see how social actors
adapt to technology limitations and thereby bring into sharp focus basic social processes
in human interaction, and to inform the design of technologies based on theories of language and the requirements of communication dynamics. Computer-mediated communication offers special opportunities for examining language and communication theory, in
that online discourse is immune to many nonverbal communication elements that may
confound language effects in speech. The role of language in communication technology
research has been cyclical, with recent research refocusing on language data as evidence of
human-computer interaction effects. Future research directions are suggested.
Keywords:

computer-mediated communication; communication technology; Internet;

language

The articles in this issue of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology represent the work of the International Association of Language and Social Psychologys (IALSP) second task force, and its focus
on language and new communication technology. We follow the trail
forged by the prior task force, which focused on language and the social
psychology of adolescence, the partial product of which appeared in
this journal (see Williams, 2003, and accompanying). The prior task
force took as their mission, and did an impressive job, synthesizing
findings, summarizing issues, and laying out future research challenges in the domain of adolescence and communication. Our group
has taken a somewhat different direction. This collection contains original empirical research on some important facets of language and
AUTHORS NOTE: Special thanks are due to several individuals who provided helpful
outside reviews during the development of some of this issues articles: Roger J. Kreuz
(University of Memphis), Penny M. Pexman (University of Calgary), and Ronald E. Rice
(University of California, Santa Barbara). We are also indebted to Natalia Bazarova of
Cornell University who, working as editorial assistant, made all of us look better.
JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY,
Vol. 23 No. 4, December 2004 384-396
DOI: 10.1177/0261927X04269584
2004 Sage Publications

384

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Walther / LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

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technology, each one shedding light on issues that have come into focus
as the Internet, related communication technologies, and prospective
new interfaces have raised and/or answered questions about language
and communication processes. Although each of these studies provides
its own introduction and makes some suggestions for future research,
they do not as a group explicitly provide historical or philosophical context, or point to broader level issues or future directions. Therefore, in
this prefatory essay, we may consider the importance of studying language and communication technology, explore how we have done so
and where it fits in the scheme of things, and identify some directions
for continued exploration.
WHY STUDY LANGUAGE
AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY?
A common way to introduce studies of new communication technologies such as computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the Internet is by citing statistics about the popularity and diffusion of technology-mediated phenomena. Surely, the prevalence of the Internet, at
least to those of us who were not raised using it, is phenomenal. It is an
amazingly short time since few of us used e-mail, to the commonplace
display of Web site addresses on billboards and the sides of buses
often accompanied by little other notationso well-ingrained has the
Internet become. That name for a Web site address, URL, has become
part of our language; e-mail is a verb now as well as a noun, and
IMing is approaching common usage. The rapid diffusion of these
systems, their ubiquity on college campuses, in workplaces, and in
many homes, have made it unnecessary to begin articles by predicting
that the Internet will diffuse or the user-base will grow by such-andsuch a percentage, and that this makes CMC a potential area worthwhile of study. Clearly, digital divides aside, we are already there,
wherever that is.
Where there is, however, is a far more important issue than popularity, ubiquity, or projected growth. Indeed there are many activities
in daily life, but their frequent exhibition alone does not make them
worthy of study to language psychologists or other social researchers.
There are of course arguments to be made about ubiquity and its cultural consequences (see e.g., C. Marvin, 1988; Thurlow & McKay, 2002),
but these connections are more often than not left unstated. Perhaps
we should discourage people from beginning articles using the popularity and ubiquity rationale. Then why study language and social psychology with respect to communication technology? For three reasons.
First, to ask how technology affects communication, language use,
and the consequent processes; to see if technology imposes, alters, or
changes the nature of our conversations, and the relationships, atti-

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tudes, or outcomes that are reflected and shaped by our communication transactions. Indeed, Hancocks research on nonliteral language
and CMC does just this, in the present issue, focusing on irony, and
ironically finding results that conflict with the predictions of traditionally oriented linguistic theory. Gergle, Kraut, and Fussells article in
this issue also shows how language is affected by different technological interfaces, in ways that allow partners to retain some distance from
one another yet reclaim the linguistic turns that provide advantage in
face-to-face collaboration.
A second reason to study language and technology takes an antithetical approach to the first. Rather than to explore how technology
fundamentally alters interactions and our abilities to achieve interaction goals, we may explore how the so-called impediments of communication technology are overcome by its users; how people adapt
semiotics as they move from one set of symbol systems to another, from
speech to text. This paradigm provides us the means to discover and
articulate principles about language, psychological processes, and
human relationships that have always been there, sometimes nascent,
but now come into focus through the lens of new tools for employing,
activating, displaying, and observing these dynamics. How we use language to manage conversations (as seen in Barons article in this
issue), to identify ourselves and others (in Herring and Martinsons
article in this issue), and to express immediacy (in OSullivan, Hunt,
and Lipperts article in this issue) are not by any means novel questions, especially in this journal, although their performance in new
environments makes more clear that they are central social processes
despite the requirements to do them in new ways.
Not long ago many scholars were pessimistic about CMCs possible
facilitation of such processes. Some researchers (e.g., McGrath, 1990)
doubted that CMC users could create conversational coherence between turns without nonverbal cues; Baron (this issue) shows that
they do. Others argued that personal identity would be difficult to convey without physical appearance cues (Sproull & Kiesler, 1986), or, liberated from physical appearance cues, no one would wish to identify
his or her gender, race, or categorical characteristics (e.g., Howard,
1997); in contrast, Herring and Martinson (this issue) show how people
try to signal gender, as well as how they signal their gender when trying not to, through language variations. Recognizing how language
alone facilitates each of these processes is a significant shift, because
such processes are often, in offline encounters, dominated by the nonverbal aspects of face-to-face interaction. Yet, to see so clearly for ourselves and in the lives of our colleagues, students, or children, that
acquainting, flirting, and coordinating are taking place through language alone, despite pessimism about pure texts ability to carry it off,

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is strong testimony to the psychological power of language and the

humans who use it. These are lessons about being human that might
remain elusive if not brought into such dramatic distinction on the
electronic proscenium.
The third rationale for studying language and technology is the
practical one, best done when informed by theories of language and
social interaction: How do we create, modify, or deploy new technological interfaces that allow us to pursue social goals more effectively? We
have all witnessed the coming and going of new killer apps (i.e., software and hardware systems that come on the scene and promise new
levels of cool). We have already seen how multi-user real-time decision
systems facilitate the display of spontaneous ideas or questions that
would otherwise be lost to turn-taking requirements, and we have
come to know firsthand how asynchronous systems allow our students
to ask us questions opportunistically, at all hours, about things that
may not be remembered, or important, or useful, if they wait for office
hours. New generations of word processors offer the same old spell
checker, but they now include new collaboration tools offering document sharing, commenting, and revising among social partners. Email programs notify us whether we have used profane words that may
offend recipients, marking hasty missives to department chairs with so
many chili peppers that they look hotter than a Thai restaurant menu.
The best of these and future technologies, are not based on hot or cool,
or transient insights. They are based on well-founded theoretical
understandings of how we use language and visual literacy, and on theoretically oriented questions about what it is we want to do. How does
language function in collaborative tasks, and what interface variables
facilitate productive language rather than impede it? In addition to the
focus on interfaces by Gergle et al. (this issue), the article by OSullivan
et al. (this issue) takes the language of immediacy into new electronic
and symbolic forms, replacing nonverbal effects and complementing
language, with both general implications and specific application to
educational contexts.
In sum, we are asking where are we as a result of new modes for the
use of language, and from this perspective, what our individual and
scholarly development on the way to this vantage point tells us about
what it means to be ourselves. Equipped with the growing inquiries and evidence in this field, here and beyond the boundaries of
the present collection, we address philosophical questions about the
nature of the human condition, psychological questions about perception and behavior, and practical questions about the system engineering or the social engineering that allows us to pursue our age-old social
goals, from finding information to finding a mate, with and without
technology.

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PURE LANGUAGE VENUES

Of all the perspectives and disciplines to look at them, it is especially
fitting to approach communication technology issues from a language
perspective. For one thing, the living presence of text-based CMC in
our lives redresses a dirty little secret in the history of communication
inquiry: our methodological pretension that communication and language are isomorphic. Heretofore, language, in speech interactions,
has been but a part of the communication complex that our research
desires to describe. Language, in speech, is always part of a larger conglomerate of cues, with the nonverbal repertoire keeping pace if not
outdistancing the verbal for many purposes. It is commonplace to
acknowledge that nonverbal behavior is as much or more a part of the
social meaning of face-to-face interactions as is language, and many
calls for research have urged us to think about the complementarity or
the integrations of these channels of expression (e.g., Cappella &
Palmer, 1990; Kendon, 1983; Jones & LeBaron, 2002). Yet our empirical
literature is more likely to ignore than to observe it (cf. Walker &
Trimboli, 1989; Walther, Loh, & Granka, in press). Understandably,
any communication event, in all its systems, may be so complex that
more than a partial glimpse is beyond reach (and so is the complexity of
language in text), and urging an integrated approach at all times is
easier than actually doing so. Nevertheless, we tend to sweep our partiality under the rug rather than abate it. Studies of persuasion, for
instance, that experimentally alter words and phrases or the alleged
speakers qualifications, in printed versions of ostensible speeches,
offer a history of bona fide findings. Yet, we know that words and reputations are a part of a dynamic multimodal exchange, and the variance
in real life accounted for by that which we can represent in words alone
is but a proportion of the variance in communicative dynamics in
actual (or even contrived) speech events. This is not to say that language variations do not cause attitude change. Rather, it is to say that
face-to-face communication, being multifaceted and multimodal, is
more than either language analysis or nonverbal analysis tends to
capture from its own perspective.
Not so in the study of online influence attempts (e.g., Guguen, 2001;
Guguen & Jacob, 2003) that are entirely language-based. E-mail
users, bulletin board writers, chat space users, and Instant Messengers employ language almost exclusively in their efforts, with great
facility, and without the noise of physical appearance, bodily coorientation, proxemic management, vocal pitch, cadence, and quality,
and numerous other cues that are part and parcel of speech but that
are absent in the online universe. CMC, for language researchers, is
the venue in which variance unaccounted for by language variables
may be attributed to measurement error rather than a host of unstud-

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ied competing communication variables. For discourse analysts who

previously defended the dismissal of nonverbal behavior in their analyses of speech, their day has arrived. There are discourses, influence
attempts, therapies, courtships, and any number of communication
events which are bona fide language episodes in the online world. The
dirty little secret, that we studied in the language of face-to-face
encounters only a part of the communication we wished to understand,
is moot in the study of new environments which L. Marvin (1995)
referred as worlds made of words.
THE ROLE OF
LANGUAGE IN CMC RESEARCH
There has been a cyclical trend in the role of language data in the
theoretical study of communication technology, even though language
dynamics are implicit in these theories. Discourse analytic research, of
course, has always kept language data front and center. Yet, recent
grand theories of CMC have not been supported with as much
language-based evidence as they have been with other kinds of variables. This may be product of the evolution of a very young field. Its earliest theories focused on relatively strong and direct effects of media on
behavior, and indeed, measured language behavior quite frequently.
Social presence theory (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976) was applied
to CMC in tests involving Interaction Process Analysis of verbal transcripts (Hiltz, Johnson, & Turoff, 1986). Kiesler and colleagues
(Kiesler, Siegel, & Mcguire, 1984; Siegel, Dubrovsky, Kiesler, &
Mcguire, 1986; Sproull & Kiesler, 1986) coded flaming and other
verbal patterns to test the lack of social context cues hypothesis.
Empirical research on the second generation of theories such as social
identification/deindividuation (Lea & Spears, 1991), social information processing, (Walther, 1992), and the hyperpersonal model
(Walther, 1996), however, initially manipulated social, physical, and/or
temporal antecedents that were hypothesized to prompt social cognitive processes within CMC, which were proposed to interact with properties of technology, in order to assess users affective and evaluative
outcomes. Outcomes were measured more frequently with self-report
scales, or with dimensional, evaluative measures assessing interaction
records, than language data implicitly associated with theoretical
events. It makes some sense to have gone that route: Earlier research
neglected contextual antecedent variables, leaving language-based
results open to multiple interpretations. Later research focused on
contexts and outcomes, under the assumption that if gross outcomes
were not there, there would be little profit in evaluating the underlying
mechanisms such as language.

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However, the field has matured. Theories that have garnered gross
level support, or conflicts among gross findings, call on us to focus on
the microscopic and behavioral aspects of real language as the evidence with which to settle our questions more directly and definitively
(see e.g., Postmes, Spears, & Lea, 2000; Thomson, Murachver, & Green,
2001; Tidwell & Walther, 2002; Walther et al., in press). The articles in
this issue continue this important trend. They have in common the
analysis of language as data, in addressing gross-level theories that
depend on language as their mechanism, or to settle theoretical conflicts that can be addressed only with language data. Social presence
theory is countered with grounding theory in this issue, with language as proof. Goal-related phenomena are addressed through comparative discourse and language data, moving beyond the descriptive
and interpretive to the more theoretical and comparative, whereas
others move from abstract outcomes to specific linguistic and symbolic
mechanisms.
FUTURE RESEARCH
What are the issues that warrant future research? In one sense, the
field needs more synthesis: How is technology used, with what impacts,
in multimodal, medium-shifting social life? Relationships are not
single-channeled, despite the tendency of much of our research to control, partial, and force these limitations for the purpose of study. Relationships that begin in one domainonline or offoften cross to the
other, either relatively permanently (e.g., when someone moves away)
or many times a day (e.g., among organizational colleagues who are not
tied to their desks). How a face-to-face encounter today provides
grounding for an e-mail message tomorrow should provide clues to
media switching, a field where theories of media selection, with their
own spotty history of testability and support, will not even fit (see for
review Dennis & Kinney, 1998; Walther & Parks, 2002). Theoretical
research that not only takes into account but can explain and predict
channel switching will be useful to the field (e.g., Turner, Grube, &
Meyers, 2001).
The field will also benefit from greater specificity in the isolation
and specification of causal factors and their specific interaction effects,
breaking apart the black box approach that Internet-related research frequently suffers. In deciphering the social effects of the
Internet communication, it is important to remember that the net is
not just about what you get, but also who you get. That is, accompanying the predominance of text-based communication, the social networks presented via the Internet may differ radically from those of
offline life. The Internet facilitates direct contact with people otherwise many degrees of separation away, and this is a terribly important

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part of what makes the Internet what it is. Unfortunately, as research

moves between experimental and survey research charting the effects
of Internet communication, the potentially distinct effects of cues versus networks is frequently conflated.
For instance, much is said about the Internet being a weak emotional or psychological medium, an assertion sometimes ascribed to
the cues it fails to convey, and/or the people with whom one is likely to
communicate, but often without distinction. The literature on Internet
effects refers to the advantages and disadvantages of communicating
with weak ties, but confuses whether such ties are weak because they
are sociometrically weak (Granovetter, 1973), developmentally weak
in terms of uniplexity or multiplexity of communication relationships,
communicationally weak because they lack the richness of nonverbal
cues, or emotionally weak because they lack real relationships at
their basis. Thus the attributes of technology are (or were) confounded.
Some headway is being made in this regard (see e.g., Eveland, 2003).
Indeed, work by Kraut et al. (1998) on the depressive effects of Internet
communication originally reasoned that mental health declines were
due to weak communication and reduced social support via the Internet relative to offline interaction. These claims were reevaluated in
follow-up research showing that Internet communication among
friends and previously acquainted partners is actually beneficial,
despite the cues filtered out by e-mail (Kraut et al., 2002). Specificity of
causes as we move forward will allow us to avoid future missteps of the
kind that the gold rush of Internet research has seen so far.
Technological developments, too, will bring exciting opportunities
for us to continue to learn about the nature of the linguistic animal.
When the dream of ubiquitous computing is real (see Weiser, 1991)
when devices offering voice, text messaging, and video are equally
available, easy, and cheap (as they are becoming even now)what
opportunities we will have to see which circumstances and human
needs prompt preferences for text and the effort of typing, rather than
voice or everything. The occasional availability of computer-integrated
video cameras for around US$10, and their widespread non-adoption,
testifies that there are affordances of language-only communication
systems that are desirable and beneficial, and the research that clarifies why that iswhat the dynamics of text-only messaging are and
why they are attractivecan be truly exciting. We have already discovered online venues that appeal precisely due to their anonymity and
the asynchronous affordances they offer to craft messages at leisure
and with care, such as the phenomenally popular electronic social
support groups online (see Walther & Boyd, 2002).
The role of video as an addition to or substitute for CMC will continue to occupy research attention, for results on the subject so far are
quite mixed, despite the clarity of the findings by Gergle et al. reported
herein. The benefits of sharing electronic objects or live images of par-

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ticipants most likely depend on the conversational task and the cognitive busyness of the participants, and text alone remains advantageous in some settings (Hinds, 1999; Slovacek, 2003). Gergle et al. (this
issue) focus on referential tasks. What alternative types of tasks exist,
and their implications for visual support, deserves conceptual and
empirical exploration. Preliminary studies combining the asynchronous characteristics of e-mail with the video capabilities of newer technologies have already shown ironic results: The effects of video depend
on the conversational involvement of the participants, and that when
the conversation draws involvement, video is distracting (Nowak,
Watt, & Walther, 2004). Sometimes less is more and more is less, but it
is still unclear when.
Technology advances will also show the further interchangeability
of technology for unaided communication behavior, allowing distant
collaborators to prosper. Nardi and Whittaker (2002) claim that information technology cannot, in principle, provide some fundamental
facilities that face-to-face interaction does, such as providing signals of
a partners availability and attention, offering the foundation for affective relationships, and so on. The argument may reflect what Rudner
(1966) called a fallacy of emergentism in social science: to argue that
because something cannot be measured and understood now, it can
never be measured and understood. The demise of the black box of faceto-face processes, and their translation to technological systems is
coming soon, harkened by interactive human-robotic interaction
demands and other telecommunications needs. Even the buddy list
notification that Instant Messenger transmits when a known partner
is online and potentially available to chat, is one technological development that signals partner availability and potential attention (see
Baron, this issue). The interchangeability of identity and emotional
indicators, from nonverbal to language cues (as in Herring & Martinson, this issue) or to icons and Web design features (OSullivan et al.,
this issue) is further evidence. As technology advances, these accommodations and substitutions will become more fluid.
What facility such fluid technologies will mean in our lives will continue to be important issues for research, just as Thurlow and McKay
(2003) discussed with regard to technology and adolescents in the previous IALSP task force report. Research will move past the media
effects models that have dominated early research in CMC, in which
the use of this or that technology has direct impacts on behaviors, outlooks, or relationships. As Thurlow and McKay seem to suggest, we
might focus not on magic bullets but on how our schemata for social
structures are widened or shaped by theoretically discernable technological and sociological factors. Just as the advent of hypertext and its
potential transformation of information was anticipated to bring about
new ways to think (Bolter, 1991), does communication accessibility
alter our conceptualizations of friendship or kinships, who our col-

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leagues are, of nearness or farness? What is going to class when lectures can be viewed online any time, or when wireless laptops seem to
encourage browsing as much as note-taking in the lecture hall (see
Hembrooke & Gay, 2003)? Issues of multitasking in general, and the
presence of language compared to other, simultaneous stimuli, deserve
exploration.
The intergroup applications of CMC and its variations offer great
promise as well. Thorough discussions and insightful exemplars of this
burgeoning area of research are available in other publications
(Postmes, Spears, Lea, & Reicher, 2000; Spears, Lea, & Postmes, 2001).
The kinds of online self-presentations, accommodations, and divergences that are being charted among gender categories, for instance
(Colley & Todd, 2002; Thomson, Murachver, & Green, 2001), call for
expansion, and communication between members of hostile ethnic or
national constituencies begs for attention: In CMC, when the turban
and the yarmulke need not be visible during interactions, can commonalities be made more salient than differences? Can relationships be
built a message at a time, if discussants have a third-party language
and a medium that makes that language more prominent than the
identities they otherwise appear to hold?
Finally, interpersonal goals and relational behavior of the most
mundane yet fundamental nature deserve attention, for the electronic
environment, once again, may change how they are done or bring them
into focus by showing how individuals work through the change in
codes. Research has focused on how we develop relations online; how do
we terminate them? How do people discourage contact, in a world
where many of us feel too accessible; through language of disaffiliation
or through timing and interaction patterns? How do individuals assert
dominance in a group, when the conversational environment is not
amenable to controlling the floor? Much research has claimed that
CMC equalizes participation in groups, measuring participation frequency to support the claim. Yet, ascribed status interacts with participation proportions in evaluating others (Weisband, Schneider, &
Connolly, 1995). The role of conventionally understood relational control messages (Millar & Rogers, 1976), conveyed through language, has
yet to be explored in online groups and dyads.
LIMITATIONS
As a collection, these articles show some gaps in their coverage of
the field. For one, the range of technologies studied is limited. New
communication technology is a broad category, and the articles that
follow focus only on two: synchronous CMC and synchronous videomediated communication. They do so in several venues, some extant
and some experimental. However, they do not take into account e-mail

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JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY / December 2004

or other asynchronous technologies, nor do they consider cell phones

and the video/photographic or simple text messaging systems that are
explosively increasing with cell phone use. Another shortfall is the
absence of contributors from outside North America. Potential participants from other lands who declined, or whose current work is focusing
on variables other than language, leave an unfortunate gap in this
issue. A focus on language variables was an editorial parameter that I
imposed, and as a result, for better or worse, this collection does dig
into the black box of technology usage for the language variables
within it. The hope is that the past and future contributions to this
journal by authors whose concerns with language and technology will
round out the current assembly, and that the current group of
authorsamong them a language historian, a linguist, cognitive and
social psychologists, and communication scholarsoffers at least a
minimally acceptable diversity of perspectives and approaches.
In conclusion, the study of new communication technology is at its
center the study of how language is used. It is fitting and refreshing for
our association and journal to focus on these phenomena. The use of
language, as is well known in this association, is systematically fluid
and accommodative. It changes in response to shifts in speakers, their
goals, and their salient social identities. Language is no less accommodative and fluid in response to the potential interaction effects of technological capacities, identities, and goals. Perhaps it is more vulnerable to these interaction effects than even speech is. Such notions about
the flexibility and capacity of language are not, in some circles of CMC
research, even yet understood to be true. In other circles, they have
become commonplace understandings. The precise questions of how
this fluidity and accommodation of language manifest themselves via
communication technologyhow they are prompted by it, modified by
it, or robust to it in personal and professional settingsare, in fact, the
questions of the day.
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Cappella, J. N., & Palmer, M. Y. (1990). The structure and organization of verbal and nonverbal behavior: Data for models of production. In H. Giles & W. P. Robinson (Eds.),
Handbook of language and social psychology (pp. 141-161). Chichester, UK: John
Wiley.
Colley, A., & Todd, Z. (2002). Gender-linked differences in the style and content of e-mails
to friends. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21, 380-392.
Dennis, A. R., & Kinney, S. T. (1998). Testing media richness theory in the new media: The
effects of cues, feedback, and task equivocality. Information Systems Research, 9, 256274.
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Joseph B. Walther (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is a professor of communication at

Cornell University. His research focuses on the use of communication cues in
the management of relationships and their products, with special emphasis on
computer-mediated communication in personal, social, and collaborative work
settings.

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2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.