One media selection I have made was for an on line meeting with a website project team. We were having some friction amongst users and the administrators concerning some rules about using our project. We had a lengthy asynchronous discussion on our forum about some topics that contributed to this tension, but in the end we decided it was necessary to have a voice conference using VoIP (voice over IP). Users and administrators were able to clear up ambiguity created by the text discussion on the website, and in the end we resolved many issues, and gained a better understanding of ones that we did not get a chance to fix.
In this case, I leaned towards moving the discussion to a more rich medium (voice chat) over continuing in a leaner medium (asynchronous discussion forum.) The lessened cues in the discussion forum lead to misunderstandings and feelings of frustration in many participants, and in many cases were not intended. Most of the discussion was negative and directed at the project team. O'Sullivan's model predicts that I would prefer to keep the discussion in a leaner channel because of the valence (negative) and locus (self) of the communication. In this case however, Media Richness Theory was correct in predicting that I chose a richer medium because of the importance of the meeting. We needed to be extremely articulate and clear with ideas and arguments.
Another media selection I continually make is concerning cellphones. I use text messaging quite often, most of the time more often than voice calls. If I want to know what someone is up to, I prefer to send a text message over calling. When I need help understanding a complicated idea from class, voice calls work better for me than text messaging.
This sorting of communications into text messages and voice calls follows the Media Richness Theory. Knowing the plans of a friend for the approaching night are not high priority items during the day when I am working, so I choose to use a quick medium that is sufficient to get my message across. A voice call would be unnecessary in the sense it contained more cues than I needed to get the information I requested. When trying to understand complex ideas, text communication would be insufficient. As the Media Richness Theory predicts, I choose a more socially salient medium in order to avoid ambiguity.
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Your example of the friction that developed while using an asynchronous forum highlights an important factor with on line communication: the conflicting views of the purpose of a message.
Seeing developer responses in game forums, hardware, and tech support forums, many times it seems as if the developer is simply posting information and thus uses very direct, imperative mood language (giving commands) in order to post the information/rules as efficiently as possible. In contrast, the users probably view the forum as an opportunity to have a dialog with the developers. While the imperative mood of developer posts is most likely not done maliciously, because users expect more of a conversationally style of voice, the directness appears blunt and rude. The lack of cues prevents people from seeing that the developers were not being malevolent.
It seems as if both theories don't take into account very well the flexibility of each medium. The actual content of developer posts is often not ambiguous, but rather the conflicting expectations of a medium can easily create friction. This requires looking further than MRT and O'Sullivan's to find the necessary medium.
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