Computer-mediated communication: human relationships in a computerized world

Human beings have developed many different relationships with computers, each suggesting a different kind of political relationship between the human and the computer. On one end of the continuum, the human dominates the computer-human communication process. On the other end, the computer dominates. As computers become increasingly user friendly, they will tend to dominate the process. Computer-mediated communication is gradually, but decisively, altering the values and ideological structure of American society. Computer-mediated communication systems generate a of terminologies that permeate the ways people think and talk not only about but also about their own psychological, interpersonal, social, legal, economic and political systems. This rhetoric of computer technology is increasingly viewed as the vocabulary of progress and the discourse of the powerful, and it reinforces the American commitment to science and as god terms of the American vision, ultimately promoting pragmatism as the dominant ideology and philosophy of the United States.