Noah Liebman

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Social Norms and Cyberasociality

Back in the day, it was assumed that people couldn’t form social relationships online because as a medium, text didn’t transmit the nonverbal cues necessary to support relationship development and maintenance. Then, in the mid-1990s, Joe Walther proposed the Social Information Processing (SIP) model of relationship development.

A big piece of SIP was that the rate of social information transmission is lower than other, more cue-rich media (like face-to-face), but over time just as much social information can be transmitted through a text-based channel. It then goes on to suggest that this is possible because users adapt the limited medium of text in ways that enable richer communication using what have come to be called CMC cues (e.g. capitalization, letter repetition, emoticons, chronemics, etc.). I call this the temporal cue density hypothesis, and it’s what I’m working on empirically testing now.

Studies that look for CMC-cue effects on social outcomes such as trust, likability, and rapport (e.g., Byron & Baldridge, 2007, Walther & D’Addario, 2001) generally work like this:

• show someone a message
• ask them what they thought of the message sender
• manipulate the cues
• show someone else the message
• ask them what they thought of the message sender
• do math

Now, the simplicity of this story may be about to be disrupted. Studies like these all have an implicit underlying assumption: all, or at least most, people within a culture interpret social cues in similar ways¹. Therefore, interpretation of CMC cues is assumed to be universal.

Cyberasociality is an empirically-backed concept proposed by Zeynep Tufekci which states that one’s inability or unwillingness to feel socially engaged by online media is a fundamental social-psychological, or even perceptual, trait of that person.

She describes it this way: language is a primarily aural construct, with reading and writing added on top as a brain-hack of visual symbolic abstraction, and some people, regardless of other cognitive abilities, have difficulty reading because of dyslexia. In much the same way, sociality evolved as a primarily — and primally — face-to-face ability. Like literacy, being social in text with abstract representations of other people is a brain hack, and one that not everyone’s brain is equally suited to perform.

If this is true, the very conception of online social norms as, well, normative may be broken.