Multimedia and network as grounds for social communication

Abstract

The article presents the role a multimedia message plays in social, computer mediated communication. This kind of communication is a dominating one in information civilization, which creates societies of knowledge, information and communication. Information technologies and their product - multimedia (understood as programming tools and multimedia message) raised possibilities of building a new, multimedia form of information transfer which enables to pass on information in a way that is most friendly and useful for a recipient but at the same time it creates a danger of information distortions if the rules of its construction are unknown. Multimedia message is characterized by frequent exchange of a sender (a message creator) role with a recipient (a code reader) role. This is caused by changeability of context and possibility of changing information structure in the process of interaction. Due to this transformation, it is difficult to place a multimedia message within a classic model of information transfer. The study presents the place a multimedia message occupies in the process of social, computer mediated communication. It emphasizes the necessity for shaping new, communicative competences that would allow to communicate effectively both within the network and via it. These new, communicative competences are understanding sent messages and creating own ones in a way that enables their proper interpretation.