One of the weaknesses of the Eisenberg et al. text is the lack of integration of new media in discussions of organizations and organizing today. The internet and mobile communication have fundamentally changed how people organize and how organizations function.
For example, distance education has been around for decades if not centuries. My father taught correspondence courses (essentially independent studies in which he mailed students course requirements and they mailed back their assignments), tv courses (lectures broadcast on campus or public access tv), and off-site courses (he went to where the students were, as with a military base). But with the exception of the off-site courses, distance ed used to mean little interaction among students. Now, online courses offer the possibility of greater interaction than what occurs in on campus classes. With online classes that use some sort of asynchronous discussion format, all students have the opportunity to participate because the usual time constraints are absent. With in person classes, there's just so much time, and unless the class size is quite small, never enough for everyone to contribute.
Eisenberg et al. tend to treat new media as something added on to organizational communication rather than something integral to organizing. That's why I included the tech and teams lecture in which I discuss the notion of a pervasive communication environment. That lecture is drawn from a small group communication book my spouse (Ted) and I are working on for McGraw-Hill. I must give him credit for the PCE model, which he presented at a conference three years ago. If you're interested in reading more about the pervasive communication environment, he recently published an essay on the model in First Monday, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed online journal.
~ Professor Cyborg
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2 comments:
First off, is pervasive communication environment a term you and your husband coined? I ask because this is the first time I came across this term. I like the use of the word pervasive since sometimes having so much information available at my finger tips temps me to look and listen to other multimedia and text all the time when I should be focusing on something else. As one book I read, we are “always on”. The PCE model reminds me of some of the graphics I have seen to explain on-line communication in a social network environment. For instance, Brian Solis of PR2.0 blog and Jesse Thomas of JESS3, created a new graphic that helps chart online conversations between the people that populate communities as well as the networks that connect the Social Web. It is called the "The Conversation Prism" which is free to use and share. It's their contribution to a new era of media education and literacy.
http://theconversationprism.com/
Ted coined the term. His PhD is in new media from U of Washington. The idea seems so logical, but no one had pulled it all together as Ted did. And in communication studies there's a strong tendency to privilege in person communication, so the study of any other mode is always compared with in person. That's why nearly all communication studies textbooks talk about "virtual" teams, friends, organizations, etc.
Thanks for the link. I'll pass it along to Ted as well.
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