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Network Nation

Hiltz, R.S. and Turoff, M. (1978). The Network Nation. Cambridge, MIT Press.

Key things to know about Network Nation:

  • These are among the very first (if not the first) social/psych CMC studies. Hiltz & Turoff built the earliest foundations of the field in the social/psych area.
  • The studies took place among invited participants. All transactions were via electronic mail in a closed network (as opposed to the wild World Wide Web we have now.)
  • They identified a number of central behaviors that later CMC research expanded: lack of social cues, unrestrained emotion, development of feelings of community between participants who had never met f2f, development of what we would now call Internet addiction, and unequal participation.
  • All the later 80s and early 90s CMC research builds off of these findings.

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