There has been some debate over the extent to which CMC affords socioemotional and relational discourse. Social presence theory states that the fewer channels or codes available within a medium, the less attention will be paid by users to the presence of other social participants. Accordingly, Kiesler et al. The authors assert that there is a resulting social anonymity around which communicators must imagine their audience. Furthermore, nonverbal indicators of vertical hierarchy, status, and power, including seating positions and dress, cannot be transmitted via text.
Some people fall in love on-line, while some people exchange angry postings.
Affiliative communication use, and its constituent messages, constitute relational communication. A second assumption is that the development of an interpersonal impression of another person is based on the information one gets via nonverbal or verbal-textual channels over the course of several interactions. One conclusion of these assumptions, and of the research which challenged their pertinent hypotheses, is that CMC can be just as deeply relational as FTF communication if sufficient time and message exchange is allowed for message volume to generate a relationship. The presumption of a drive for affiliation helps explain why conference participants would express supporting references despite a lack of familiarity with co-participants. Grammatical markers include gratuitous capitalization as well as repeated exclamation points and question marks to add affective emphasis.