Hi there, I was reading your forum and found it to be really interesting. I'm a Dutch student currently working on my thesis for my graduation from university. My major is in Communication and Media and I'm working on an online conference project right now. For my thesis I'm interested in the social part of online conferences (my interest lies mostly with the the bigger online conferences, hosted by for instance Caucus). In literature a lot of pros and cons of online conferencing are mentioned, but mostly the cons concentrate on (for as far a I can see) the difficulty to socialize with other participants, the lack of immediate feedback and the lack of social content cues and individual expressiveness. Most of the cases/experiments reported on are however conducted with software that basically only existed of a (more or less advanced) bulletin board system (so asynchronous text-based communication). From what I've read about the subject it appears that researchers expect that by the use of multimedia it will be possible to lessen this sense of social isolation that participants experience. My theory is (of course I could be wrong) that also synchronous text-based communication can have this effect (because you get immediate feedback, conversation is usually less formal and there's more immediate interaction). So far I haven't been able to find any research that confirms or denies this theory. When, surfing the internet looking for info on this topic, I came accross your forum and I decided to give it a try and see if maybe there's somebody out there who can give me some pointers on where to search. I have found some articles, but most of them are not very recent, so I'm especially interested in recent research in this area. I hope you can help me.
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