Technologies and Personal Communication

Nowadays, with advances in technologies and communication systems, interaction between people mostly happens online through computers and the Internet. It is a widespread trend in working environment; also, it enhances personalized connections between family members, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. In our modern world, when people are either forced to interact via a computer, or wish to do so, they increasingly use new technologies that at least partly incorporate aspects of everyday face-to-face communication, thus retaining most features of personal contact.
In the past, Internet-based communication used to be deficit-laden compared to personal contact, and it was impossible to get the cues we rely on in everyday face-to-face interaction. While this was true for merely text-based communication, more recent forms of Internet interaction have adopted numerous additional features and incorporated several of these cues, which makes it personalized enough and does not deprive people of the possibility to have personal contacts.
Not only can we convey personal messages and engage in impression management via various video platforms, but also have a direct contact with the help of such video platform as Skype. It allows people to talk to each other and have a well-personalized contact through the video, which resembles a normal everyday communication. It is widely used now in working and private environments due to webcam integrated in personal computers.
However, the reality is that despite the fact that a wide number of people use different applications like Skype as substitutes for direct interaction, there is an overwhelming quantity of people who try to avoid direct contacts even in such computer-mediated formats. Heavy usage of Sims, Forsaken World or the status messages within the social networking sites means that not all people really like personal communication and would like most of their personal life kept intact from outside intrusion. Wide use of these means of indirect communication can be explained considering extra aspects not applicable in conventional face-to-face communication, allowing the speaker or user to choose what information to convey and what to keep secret. For example, Sims or Forsaken World present the user with additional options for creating his or her own image and characteristics, thus giving people a total control over their self-representation. This exceptional feature enhances interaction experience for people who have problems in real-life communication. Avatar technologies have developed to the extent that elaborate human-like figures can be used to represent oneself in various cyber worlds and the Internet. These avatar-populated worlds allow people to communicate online with other users with the help of basic nonverbal communication means as well as chat or voice over IP conversations.
Besides the fact that face-to-face communication mediated by computer is becoming increasingly popular, the same seems to be true for human-computer interaction. Instead of mere text-based interaction, the modern technologies provide users with the possibility to contact human-like embodied agents that autonomously interact with the human. In the future, these artificial agents should dramatically facilitate the handling of computers and the Internet by means of natural speech and multimodal nonverbal interaction. Such applications are widely used in e-commerce allowing the communication (equivalent to that which would be expected in a human face-to-face conversation) between the representative of the company (which is basically a robot) and a customer.