Video-Mediated Communication

From the Publisher: Decades after their introduction, video communication systems are beginning to realize their potential to support working from home, conferencing at a distance, and collaborating and communicating in general. In the face of an upsurge in interest, important questions are being asked: What function does video really serve, and what advantages over the telephone does it provide? How and why is video-mediated interaction different from face-to-face interaction? How can we best configure video technology to support different kinds of work at a distance? What is the role of video technology in the future? People from a variety of disciplines have now produced a substantial body of research addressing these questions from a wide range of analytic perspectives. But their results and conclusions are scattered through journals, conference proceedings, and corporate technical papers. Drawing together the ideas and findings of the major researchers in the field, this volume offers the first comprehensive overview of what we currently know about video-mediated communication. Authors include psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, engineers, and computer scientists.