Announcing the Final Examination of Tami Gitto-Kania for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Texts & Technology
While digital mediation can facilitate some aspects of communication, such as increasing scope and access to communicative possibilities, those gains are overwhelmed by the failure of digital mediation to support empathy. Time spent online and in front of a screen has increased exponentially during the last three decades. This has led to a great deal of interpersonal communication becoming digitally mediated. In this project, I assess user experiences with DMC on interpersonal discourse to gain insight into user perceptions of empathic communication in the form of Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging. I employ survey and interview protocols on a sampling of undergraduate students on one campus of a regional community college. While some think that DMC opens new spaces for social connections, others believe that DMC has a negative impact on our social relations by challenging empathetic connections between interlocutors. I hypothesized that empirical evidence will support this second view, and found support for this hypothesis in my results. Results of this investigation may be used to determine the conditions under which empathy is diminished in DMC and help us consider improved protocols for employing this ever-expanding mode of interpersonal communication. This study is unique in that it attempts to evaluate empathy, a concept that is challenging to define, describe, and measure, in a digitally-mediated context.
Committee in Charge:
Committee Chair: Dr. Jonathan Beever
Committee Member: Dr. Martha Brenckle
Committee Member: Dr. Joel Schneier
Committee Member (External): Dr. Mary Jean Amon
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