Although communication via computers is not a new subject,
the recent exponential increase of such an activity has reached the point that for many people electronically distributed communication supplants the postal service, telephone, and even the fax machine.
Accompanying computerized communication is an expected convergence between electronic communication and media that is to lead us to the long promised mingling of radio, television, and computer. As all these technological innovations are drastically changing our world, there is a necessitating challenge to comprehend their social, psychological, and cultural impacts.
To this purpose, in the present article we intend to review some of the social implications of computerized communication. We start by discussing some important events in the history of computer conferencing systems and we give a short presentation of the main communication services on the world-wide computer network of the Internet. Subsequently, focusing on computer-mediated communication we review the main social and psychological implications resulting from the fact that the computer medium deprives communicants of social, physical, and contextual cues. In addition, computerized communication creates a social information processing environment, where a variety of relational and socioemotional interpersonal interactions may flourish. Next we examine the behavioral role of naming via pseudonyms or hiding personal information by anonymity and the creation and recreation of identities in the computer-mediated social space. Finally, we discuss some topics related to gender differences in computerized communications.