ABSTRACT
Not very long ago, but before the Internet was commonplace, many people (researchers included) feared that interacting with others through computer systems would cause people to become mechanical. Computer-mediated communication would cause dehumanization, it was claimed (Orcutt & Anderson, 1977). Although their findings were aggressively challenged later on, numerous early experiments concluded that groups who communicated in computer-mediated communication (CMC) experiments were more impersonal, task-oriented, and rude than were parallel face-to-face (FtF) groups (see for review Walther, 1996).
