Final Blog

My first computer mediated communication form was probably e-mail. I set up my first account when I was a freshman in High School. Back in those days my inbox only had spam and some emails from my older sister. During that year I went on vacation to Mexico and became very close to one of my cousins. She has grown up in Mexico but had just moved to Houston to attend school. We knew that keeping in touch through the phone would be expensive so we decided to exchange email addresses. At first I didn’t think that it would be hard but I hadn’t taken into consideration the language barrier between us. Her first language was Spanish, and although she was learning English it was hard for me to understand her. On the other hand my Spanish is not that great especially when written. My cousin had told me that she would write to me in English because she wanted to practice the language. I decided to write in Spanish but I used English when I had trouble. Using e-mail definitely hindered our communication and made it harder for us to understand one another. It was hard for me to understand what she meant sometimes and vice versa. Sometimes words and sayings would not translate very well. The context of where I was did not really affect the conversation because e-mail is private in the sense that only the person you address it to will be able to read it. I did not have to worry about others reading what I had written to her. The medium used was sort of tricky because a lot of non verbal cues and parts of the message get lost through an email. When a “communication breakdown” did occur it could have been isolated to both the medium and the message. From the beginning a language barrier already existed which affected the message and the medium also affected our understanding of the message. Through time we were able to adapt to one another’s form of writing.