hyperpersonal communication

I gave a lecture on online interaction on the course Online games and online-socialising yesterday. It was fun and a good opportunity to present quotations from interviews. As on the InterMedia-seminar on Social software in December, I referred to Samantha Henderson and Micheal Gilding's article "'I've never clicked this much with anybody in my life': trust and hyperpersonal communication in online friendships (New media and society, vol. 6(4)). Unfortunately and a little embarrassingly I didn't exactly remember what 'hyperpersonal communication means. It is not, as I assumed, just another word for computer-mediated communication. The student who suggested to look at the original meaning of hyper was quite right. Hyper in the sense of above, more than normal, excessive. The concept is taken from Joseph Walther "to desribe the way in which online communication sometimes 'surpasses the level of affection and emotion of parallell face-to-face communication." I might take a look at that Walther-article, which can be found in Communication Research (1996), vol. 23(1)