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tting content may not be good for reproducing relationships.
The implicit purpose of communication is to motivate a listener (or recipient) to do, or understand, something communicated. Thus the use of technology extends and limits the very power of communication. It extends our ability to access and connect, but limits our ability to communicate and bind. Repercussions can be seen at all levels of society, from individual and interpersonal to macro-social.
Our study of communication technologies will borrow from pragmatics, which is branch of linguistics that emphasizes the "how" of what we say (in addition to the "what"). A pragmatics of mediated interaction would thus emphasize the production and performance of mediated communication and interaction, focusing on the practices developed around connectivity technologies.
To function, technologies must map to human action just as humans must grasp and relate through technology. The greater the transparency of one domain to the other, and the greater the transitivity of actions from one through the other, the more effective their interface.
From the perspective of the network, we function as nodes through which communication flows. In short, we're transitive to the net's communication flows, and our participation (our availability and presence in the network) is as important to it as it is to us.
All experience is situated in time and place. But communications technologies lift communication and interaction from the here and now that grounds face-to-face interaction. This dislocation of temporality from its situatedness in the world is one of the fundamental operations of mediation.
Indeed, communications technologies are as much about time and temporality as they are about distance and space. Synchronous media permit direct communication in real time. Asynchronous media permit communication only through use of a recording medium (e.g. text), and not in real time. Both interv...