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What is different about human communication in business organizations when it takes place via the new communication technologies like electronic mail? The most distinctive quality of these new technologies is that they are interactive in nature, in that they allow the participants in a communication process to have control over, and exchange roles in, their mutual discourse. Interactive commu nication technologies usually spread among the members of a system rather slowly until a critical mass of adopters is reached, as the case of Internet illus trates. After the critical mass occurred, the rate of adoption of Internet took off suddenly. Interactive communication provides a relatively high degree of flexi bility, which in turn allows the user to have a high degree of control over the technology and the communication that takes place via the new interactive technologies.
Rogers et al. (Sat,) studied this question.