What constitutes interaction on the Internet today is not the same as it was a decade ago. In fact, people are always finding new ways to use the communication media around them. It was not so long ago that people thought of the telephone as a technology used exclusively for the exchange of oral symbols. You would dial the number of a person or business across the country and expect to talk to a person on the other end of the line. If, however, the topic of your conversation involved discussing anything printed, such as a legal contract, you would have to wait until it arrived through traditional mail-handling services. However, the proliferation of the facsimile machine (fax) throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Walker, Tames, Man, & Freeman, 1996) allowed people to transmit written materials and even images over the same telephone lines they used for speaking (albeit they would not allow you to speak and send a fax at the same time). The fax machine changed our thinking about telephony as a technology for more than just vocal presentation. Now we also know it as a tool for communicating documents—and even electronic signatures—as well.

The Internet has had a similar history. At one time, interaction over it was largely limited to text-based exchanges. E-mail, BBSs, MUDs, and IRCs are forms for the exchange of textual messages. The use of words alone is still a popular means of online communication, but now people can also share images and sounds through their computers. The innovations brought by the introduction of the World Wide Web over the last decade have broadened the sensory data that people can share over the Internet. Scholars have examined communication in each of these five forms of CMC.

E-mail is perhaps the most popular and familiar channel for communicating through the Internet. Like its ancestor, the much slower, paper-based “snail-mail” routed through traditional postal means, e-mail involves the exchange of textual messages between two or more parties. Unlike its ancestor, e-mail arrives very quickly and seems to express meaning in a notably variant fashion.

Electronic letters are fascinating rhetorical documents whose credibility is largely reliant on the number of “forwards” they have enjoyed rather than the quality of arguments they offer. Some of the claims, such as the one that says Microsoft will give you money just for forwarding an e-mail message, may seem more credible to someone who regularly uses e-mail than they would to an outside observer. It is, after all, difficult to argue with dozens (if not hundreds) of people, some of whom you know, who are willing to take the chance that the claims just might not be false and have already forwarded the message.

Electronic letters might also owe their popularity to another aspect of the technology. Unlike their paper-bound predecessors, electronic chain letters are much easier to forward. With a few clicks of your keyboard, dozens of acquaintances can receive the same promising news without the unnecessary hassles of photocopying the message and paying postage to mail it. However easy it might be to forward such messages, it is unlikely that person-to-person e-mail will ever catch on as a valued (and hence financially rewarding) marketing tool. As the wise have often counseled: Any promises that seem too good to be true, probably are.

A variant of e-mail called a bulletin board system (BBS) is also a form for text-based communication, but distinguished by the size of the audience it attempts to reach and the technological manner in which messages are read. In a BBS, individual contributors send messages to a single computer address. The program then posts these individual messages that visitors can access and read at their discretion. In this manner, a BBS functions like the kiosks or wall-mounted boards you see around your college campus covered with public announcements for fraternal rushes and credit card offers. Unlike these cluttered presentations, however, a BBS organizes incoming materials so that subsequent messages responding to previous messages are ordered one right after another. Such an aggregate is called a thread and each can continue to extend for as long as contributors continue to send in submissions. Interestingly, these threads practice a type of hypertext in that contributions layer on and reflect back on one another. . .