I met both my current boyfriend and my ex through online dating. This used to be fairly taboo to admit to, but it seems that the standards have shifted to apps like Tinder being cultural phenomena unto themselves. It seems that more people have tried internet mediated dating than not, making it a more “acceptable”…

Utilizing digitally mediated interaction has a few distinct advantages over “real world”, face to face communication. One of the bigger advantages, the subject of the hyperpersonal model, is the ability to manage one’s presentation to another. The ability exists to control representation of oneself and dictate the terms on which communication occurs. Basically, you can…

All three of the above labels I would apply to myself in some fashion or another. One of the great things that the internet has brought has been the ability to gather disparate communities together under larger banners, or bring people together who might have otherwise never been able to find each other, assuming that…

It appears to be easier to devalue others when communicating online. The lack of physical presence and perhaps emotional cues causes a lack of recognition of the humanity of others. Dissociative anonymity, asynchronicity, perceived lack of repercussions and a host of other factors can cause disinhibition, where an otherwise civil individual can change their tone…

Another situation that is near to me is the inability to determine emotional state via written communication. While I mentioned before that people have found a few ways to handle the obstacle of the lack of body language, or even use it to their advantage, just as often as a message is interpreted correctly, it…

I was born in 1988 into a middle class family. I recall my father owning an early personal computer (if I recall correctly, a Timex Sinclair), and we obtained a used Commodore 64 when I was very young. It was used almost exclusively for the incredible electronic games that came with it, but it was…

Professor Yochai Benkler has described collaborative projects and open-source economics as a form of “commons-based peer production”. Peer production, in his terms, is an opportunity to practice virtuous behavior. The internet has enabled virtuous behavior to affect large scale projects, in turn spreading the virtues of the system and producing output that could not be…

There are countless places that you can find claims of a study which found that only 7% of communication is verbal. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that since the veracity of that claim cannot be determined, and that it’s difficult to prove that one rule would govern all communication like…

As Clive Thompson recounts for CBC, anonymous users of social media and message boards are just as likely to post negative content as logged in users, whether they use a pseudonym or not. This thought goes against the popular wisdom of anonymous commenters feeling freer to use negative emotions in discussion, yet makes sense in…