Author(s)

J. Shires

Abstract

Internet communication, like traditional mediated communication, places a barrier between the message’s sender and receiver. However, where traditional mediated communication (television, magazines) is unidirectional, internet technologies provide for one-on-one communication albeit with a high degree of mediation. The basic ontology of this interaction has yet to be fully explicated. Traditional communication theory focuses on interactions that are face-to-face while mass communication theory looks at communication situations where feedback is delayed or completely absent. Internet interactions are both interpersonal and mediated and, at the same time, are neither of these. The paper will use the framework of self- and other-informed theories of Edmund Husserl and Mikhail Bakhtin to understand how users construct \“faces” for all parties involved in the internet communicati

Keywords