is online communication that takes place independent of time or location, or at anytime, anywhere. Participants send messages through e-mail, listserv, or newsgroup to a central location (discussion board, forum), read the retrieved or posted messages, and provide comments or feedback.
Published in Chapter:
Online Interaction and Threaded Discussion
Hongbo Song (Yantai University, China) and
Shuyan Wang (The University of Southern Mississippi, USA)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 8
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-881-9.ch105
Abstract
Human beings are social creatures who habitually communicate with each other and share among themselves. Human interaction is the interchange of suppositions, intentions, and meanings. As a vital thinking and socializing tool, interaction is essential for every human activity and is a complex symbolic process in which meaning is created and negotiated as persons in conversations coconstruct their social realities (as cited in Comeaux, 2002). In fact, “The formation of opinion takes place through conversation of individuals with members of groups to which they belong or through that inner conversation of thought which is outer conversation imported into the mind” (Mead, 1938, p. 616). Mead’s “inner conversation of thought” supports the claim that human beings are meaning driven by not only the result of social interaction, but also meanings reprocessed through interpretation (Blumer, 1969).