ABSTRACT
Interpersonal communication concerns the study of social interaction between people. Interpersonal communication theory and research seeks to illuminate how individuals use verbal discourse and nonverbal actions, as well as written discourse, to achieve a variety of instrumental and communication goals such as informing, persuading and providing emotional support to others. Interpersonal communication traditionally has been conceived of as a process that occurs between people encountering each other face-to-face. Increasingly, social interaction is being accomplished through the use of such communication technologies as computers and mobile telephones, thus adding another dimension to this area of communication inquiry. However, technologically mediated social interaction is hardly new, having been possible since land-line telephone technology came into widespread use during the early decades of the 20th century. This older form of mediated interpersonal communication has been examined by communication researchers (Hopper, 1992).
