Evalutation

• Strength: support for absence of gating

  McKenna and Bargh found that lonely and socially anxious people were able to express their 'true selves' more in CMC than in FtF situations. Of the romantic relationships that initially formed online, 70% survived more than two years, higher than for relationships formed in the offline world. This suggests that CMC can be helpful to support people who are socially anxious to build confidence in forming relationships
• Strength: supporting model for hyperpersonal model

  Whitty and Johnson found supporting evidence for both hyperhonest and hyperdishonest online disclosures. Questions asked in online discussions tend to be direct, probing and intimate and responses direct and to the point, quite different from in FtF conversations. This is consistent with the prediction of the model that these are distinctive types of disclosure in CMC
• Limitation: do not distinguish types of CMC

  From online e-commerce forms through to Facebook and to online dating, the level of self-disclosure varies considerable. People disclose more in areas that they consider private (e.g. Facebook statuses that will only be seen by 'friends') and disclose less on webforms that involve the collection of data. This means that the validity of theories that consider all CMC in the same way will be limited
• Limitation: lack of research support for reduced cues theory

  Walther and Tidwell assert that cues in CMCs are simply different from those in FtF ones. They found that there are plenty of cues in CMCs, just not the nonverbal ones that we recognise in FtF communication. Emoticons are considered effective substitutes in CMCs for the lack of usual nonverbal cues, so the proposal that there are reduced cues in CMCs appears unfounded. This suggests that there may be no differences in self-disclosure between CMC and FtF relationships, which does not support reduced cues theory