How Do Sociological Conceptualizations of Communication Technologies Misuse Face-to-Face Interaction?

Social scientists analyzing computer-mediated communication have taken two broad approaches: either focusing on communication technology's impact on social relations (e.g. changing how people do business, consume products, etc), or on the impact of social relations on communication technology (e.g. 'digital divide'). Scholars working in this area commonly assume that communication technologies have decentered face-to-face interaction in social and organizational life. Yet, these same scholars tend to treat face-to-face interaction as the underlying paradigm of interaction for the communication processes they study. Taking up these issues, this paper argues that sociologists of communication technologies implicitly adopt one or another version of face-to-face interaction as an analytic referent against which the distinctive qualities of computer mediated communication may be compared, contrasted and illuminated, therein treating a main topic of their analysis as an analytical resource. Thus, despite their reliance on face-to- face interaction as a foundational reference point for analyses of computer mediated communication, scholars skirt the issue of what face-to-face interaction uniquely provides in communication processes. This paper contributes to the research on computer-mediated communication processes in three ways: (1) grounded in social interactionist theory, it provides an understanding of what face-to-face interaction uniquely provides in communication processes, (2) it offers a theoretical baseline researchers can use to make comparisons between face-to-face interaction and other communication media, and (3) it speculates on the analytical future of face-to-face interaction within the study of computer mediated communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]