Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

“Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous, or at least attempted
humor.” But “The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get
the joke and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response.” 4 After giving some thought to the
problem, he posted the message seen in Figure 12.3.Thus, the (emotion icon) was born. An
emoticon is a series of characters which is designed to help readers interpret a writer’s intended tone or
the feelings the writer intended to convey. Over the years, many different emoticons were created like
the smiley and sad faces, lol (laughing out loud), ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing), :-O (surprise), :-*
(kiss), :-P (sticking your tongue out), :-/ (quizzical), :-X (sealed lips), 0:-) (angel), *\0/* (cheerleader), and
so many others. As we’ve discussed previously in this text, so much of how we understand each other is
based on our nonverbal behaviors, so these emoticons were an attempt to bring a lost part of the human
communicative experience to a text-based communicative experience.
Some technologies are what we call , a mediated form of communication in which the
sender and receiver are not concurrently engaged in communication. When Person A sends a message,
Person B does not need to be on the computer at the same time to receive the message. There could
be a delay of hours or even days before that message is received and Person B responds. In this case,
asynchronous messages are akin to letter writing.
We still engage in a wide range of asynchronous CMC. Some common forms of asynchronous
communication today include email, texting, social media posts, and classroom discussion boards. Think
about your own CMC behavior. What asynchronous methods for CMC do you engage in daily?
Let’s switch gears for a bit and talk about the history of communication on the Internet. As
the Internet grew and speed and infrastructure
IRC
Chat Client
IRC
Chat Client
SERVER
Figure 12.4 Internet Relay Chat
IRC
Chat Client
IRC
Chat Client
became more established, synchronous
CMC was developed, a mediated form of
communication in which the sender and receiver
are concurrently engaged in communication.
When Person A sends a message, Person B
is receiving that message in real time, like they
would in a face-to-face (FtF) interaction.
The first synchronous mode of
communication was the chatroom. In 1988,
Jarkko “WiZ” Oikarinen wrote the code for the
first Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client and server
at the University of Oulu, Finland. IRC was
initially started as a system to replace an existing
BBS, but WiZ realized that he had something
completely different. With IRC, individuals
from around the world could login using an IRC
Chat Client (software on their computer), which
would allow them to access a server elsewhere
in the world to interact with people in real time
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