hyperpersonal again

You may know that I'm rather interested in theoretical implications of digital technology for mass communication vs. interpersonal communication (or mass media vs. personal media). My first serious attempt at writing an article for my phd-dissertation concerns these questions. I recently found a paper by Scott E. Caplan from 2001, called "Challenging the mass-interpersonal communication dichotomy: are we witnessing the emergence of an entirely new communication system?". Caplan suggest that computers have spawned a new hyperpersonal communication system, which existing theories of interpersonal or mass communication systems are unable to define or explain. That is, we now have interpersonal, hyperpersonal and mass communication. I still haven't read Walther's article "Computer-mediated communication: impersonal, interpersonal and hyperpersonal interaction (published in Communication Research in 1996), but this article is of course Caplan's point of departure. Hyperpersonal communication suggests that such communication is optimal despite, or more precisely, because of the lack of visual cues. Participants control the quantity, quality and the validity of personal information available to other participants. Moreover participants tend to inflate their perceptions of the other based on the restricted amounts of visual cues.

My informants often say things that confirm this description of hyperpersonal communication:

Sophia: I think it’s easier to have serious conversations on msn than anywhere else, because you don’t have to look people in the eyes.
Dina: I think so too. Like, if I’m going to tell somebody about something serious, then I prefer to use, if not msn, then at least, to write it. It’s much easier. Then you can emphasise more strongly how to express something than when you sit and talk, because then you really just have to take it then and there.

Still, I'm not going to follow Caplan's suggestion of calling this a new and separate system. MSN-conversations are still interpersonal. That participants open up more does not change this. I still prefer to understand communication processes as a continuum between symmetrical (interpersonal interaction) and asymmetrical (mass mediated (quasi)interaction) (model from previous blog-entry).