Theories, Boundaries, and All of the Above

Abstract

Our immediate challenge in computer-mediated communication (CMC) research has to do with refinement of theories, and the most important refinement has to do with the articulation of boundary conditions. Boundary conditions stipulate the contextual conditions in which different theoretical chains-of-events are expected to occur. Boundary specifications will help us understand when one theoretical process applies, or when a different one applies, or even—and this is no easy task—precisely whencommunicatorsshiftfromonetypeofprocesstoanother.Boundariesarebeing foisted upon us by technological developments that may limit (or maybe revise) the scope of our extant theoretical frameworks. There are implicit boundaries that have alwaysbeentherebutwhichwehaveignored,misapprehended,orfailedtoinvestigate. Because we have not done a good job of articulating boundary conditions we have reached a point in the field’s development at which our summaries can appear to college students to be just as incoherent as many more established disciplines’ textbooks. We can talk about how online social interaction phenomena were accounted for in the 1980sin reference to Cause A; in the 90’s, other researchers claimed that the same phenomenon was due to Cause B’s dynamics, and they did an experiment where they did X and Y to show how B was correct and A was not; but in 2002 Him and Her argued that the phenomenon was actually due to Cause C, and their sophisticated study which isolated factor D showed that C was in fact true. We can look back across an extremely short history of research and find that at one time or another, radically different explanations have been applied, quite persuasively, to the same phenomena. Ontheonehand,thiscouldbehealthyprogress.Scientificadvancementshouldbe cumulative and new explanations should be capable of subsuming old findings. But our current state may not reflect knowing which explanation definitively prevails, or failing toexamine whether theyaddress different phenomena and needing to identify which explanation may or may not be true under different specifiable circumstances.