History And Contemporary Situation Of The Research Of Computer-mediated Communication

Since the middle of 1990s, the Internet has expanded greatly to become the biggest and most popular global computer information network, and nowadays, it has almost covered all countries and regions. Meanwhile, it also has broken through the traditional concepts of regional politics, economies and cultures and built a new virtual information-oriented space which crossed borders, cultures and languages. In 1995, China began to provide the Internet entry service for the ordinary people, and from that time, the Internet in China walked into a marketlization period with high speed. During the ten years, the impacts and values of Internet have gradually emerged in every social field. On the same time, the research enthusiasm on Internet has also come into being in academic field of our country. Particularly, the scholars in the journalism and communication field have paid full attentions to the innovative impacts which caused by Internet. With the rapid development of Internet and network media, the research rang of the subject of computer-mediated communication has been continually enlarged and deepened. This paper will adopt the research logic with the integration of the vertical review and horizon descriptive, the combination of the positive analysis and normal analysis. Firstly, we will collect the articles about the computer-mediated communication in four kinds of academic journalisms in recent years, making use of the content analysis approach and calculating the relative data, to summary the contemporary basic situation about Chinese computer-mediated communication research; then, under the basic theoretic framework of communication, we depict and review the present main theories and try to devote ourselves to build the academic history of computer-mediated communication. The paper will try to answer the following two questions, one is the frequency that the articles of computer-mediated communication were published in recent ten years by the main-streamed academic journals in China; the other is their research themes, approaches ----especially their main views. According to above conclusions, we will summary the contemporary main problems about computer-mediated communication in China and discuss how to strengthen the present research.