17 e-Mediation - Mediate.com

Noam Ebner
menting their experiences, conducting experiments of their own and sharing these with
the e-mediation community.
While e-mediation and face-to-face mediation are certainly closely related, this chapter
has demonstrated a wide range of elements characterizing e-mediation as a distinctive
field of practice. These distinctive elements might tend to blur in the future, as interactionsat-a-distance
continue to become increasingly ubiquitous, and online communication
becomes second nature. However, even as the salience of some of the elements described
in this chapter recedes, future research might show more significant areas of distinction
between the two processes. We might discover, for example, different types of practitioners
choosing to engage in each type of mediation, as individuals who would not ordinarily
consider practicing mediation face-to-face find themselves very comfortable doing so
screen-to-screen, and vice versa. It would be interesting to compare measurements of
success across both processes; we would anticipate that practitioners’ success practicing
one type will not necessarily predict their success practicing the other. Finally, we might
discover that different types of people participate as parties in either process, taking
advantage of the new type of venue shopping the two processes allow. All this, however,
is subject to the caveat that predicting the future of anything technology-related is, at best,
a shot in the dark. For the time being, we can enjoy watching the expansion of e-mediation
into new dispute contexts, geographical areas and institutions.
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