Since the beginning of humanity people have always communicated in one way or another. For thousands of years it was only communication from the person's body. Then eventually writing came along, persisting for hundreds of years as the only other way of communication other than your body motions, your voice, and your expressions. In more recent times, technology such as the telegraph, telephone, and television greatly enhanced the degree to which people could reach out to each other.

The newest form of communication has come in recent times, only being a few decades old: computer mediated communication, or just CMC. This communication is anything through a computer or device, for example emails or text messages or social networking. Now I believe, along with most other people, that these new forms of reaching people have huge benefits to everyone who can access it. Many would agree, however, that CMC also has its disadvantages, which will be the focus of this post.

A post by Denver Technology highlights some of these views that I believe happen with CMC. The first thing I always think of with these disadvantages is the absence of the physical parts of communication. Denver Technology talks about this point discusses this and it was also mentioned in class, so it is clearly an agreed-upon issue. What I mean by a lack of the physical aspects in communication is that there are no facial expressions, no tone, no gestures, nothing that will regularly come with face to face communication. The post mentions how this lack of gestures and non-verbal communication can cause many challenges for communication. How do you know if someone really means something or if they are lying? Normal non-verbal cues that allow us to know this are now missing with CMC.

Building off this, it was discussed in class how this can now create misleading information. For example, an entire article may just be sarcasm, but without the emotion of regular speech, a more oblivious reader may take it seriously and believe. This issue can create a large riff in communication.

Another disadvantage that is talked about by Denver Technology that I had not thought of before is that CMC takes away the "informal and impromptu learning that happens in a physical work space" (Ferazzi). What they mean by this is that CMC takes away those random encounters with others that build their social skills and relationships and overall allow you to meet knew people. You do not bump into someone over the internet, that does not happen. In my opinion, with a higher proportion of virtual encounters compared with these random times of socialization, people may lose this skill in general. When an opportunity does happen when you would need to socialize like this to get to know other people, you might just end up being that awkward guy and make it uncomfortable for others. This lack of the ability to spontaneously socialize can largely be blamed on an increase in CMC. I know this problem has happened to me before so I have no problem with agreeing with the post by Denver technology on it.

Overall, CMC has done many great things, like eliminating long distance communication and making communication almost instantaneous. These benefits probably outweigh the mentioned disadvantages. The issues from CMC, however, are still important and do cause issues with other forms of communication. These problems are just some things people need to keep in mind while exploring the vast options of CMC.