CMC in Personal Relationships Chp6

This chapter gives an introduction to the concepts of relational maintenance and what they are. They apply primarily to FtF communication as they were developed before CMC. After the advent CMC they were tweaked to fit the new media. Unfortunately the rapid development of CMC has brought new methods of communication and with their growing popularity many of the old relational maintenance concepts no longer accurately describe the phenomenon they were meant to. Much of the chapter is an explanation of how the old concepts of relational maintenance have become antiquated in the new world of web 2.0.  The authors concede that while much data still needs to be collected it is possible to speculate on how these new methods of CMC affect relational maintenance.  I found the section on cost benefit analysis of various FtF and virtual asynchronous relational maintenance actions very interesting. I have no doubt this is an area psychologists or anyone who has had a long distance relationship will be very interested in.