Computer Mediated Communication

Human beings have developed many different relationships with computers, each suggesting a different kind of political relationship between the human user and the computer. On one end of the continuum, the human user dominates the computer-human communication process. On the other end, the computer dominates. As computers become increasingly "user friendly", they will tend to dominate the process. Computer-mediated communication is gradually, but decisively, altering the values and ideological structure of American society. Computer-mediated communication systems generate a rhetoric of terminologies that permeate the ways people think and talk not only about technology but also about their own psychological, interpersonal, social, legal, economic and political systems. This "rhetoric of computer technology" is increasingly viewed as the "vocabulary of progress" and the "discourse of the powerful", and it reinforces the American commitment to science and technology as "god terms" of the American vision, ultimately promoting pragmatism as the dominant ideology and philosophy of the United States.