My first instance of media selection involved my AI project group. We were required to submit a project proposal to one of the course TA’s earlier in the course. He later responded to our proposal via e-mail. He stated that our project goals might be too ambitious for the scope of the course, and that we should try to flesh out more detailed checkpoints to indicate progress. We wanted clarification as to the feasibility of our project and how we should proceed, so we chose to meet him in person rather than do further communication through e-mail.
In this case, we actively chose to use a rich medium (FtF). This supports the media richness theory. Specifically, we thought his initial comments were ambiguous over e-mail, so we needed to see immediate feedback from him to understand in detail what he was looking for. This situation totally contradicts O’Sullivan’s impression management model: the valence is negative (our proposal is being critiqued), and the locus is self. Impression management predicts that we are most likely to want a mediated interaction in this case, but instead we chose an unmediated interaction.
The second instance of media selection involved a friend asking for computer assistance. After a short exchange in which I made a few suggestions after diagnosing his problem, he complemented me for being so good at figuring out what went wrong.
Once again, this media selection instance supports the media richness theory. The communication task was simple and clear – a praise. Therefore, media richness theory predicts a plain medium is preferred for communication; this is exactly what happened. Moreover, the impression management model predicts the total opposite result again. From my friend’s perspective, he is the one giving the praise. Consequently, the valence is positive and the locus is other. According to O’Sullivan’s experimental data, this category implies the highest preference for an unmediated interaction.
An interesting thing to note is that while media richness theory happened to accurately reflect the interactions I’ve seen, it can also be argued that it was simply more conventional. For the first case, our paramount goal was to resolve the issue as quickly as possible; e-mail is simply too asynchronous to be a good choice. Video conferencing may have worked just as well as FtF, but the latter is more common in academia, so that is what we used. For the second case, my friend was already asking me for help through instant messenger; it would be unusual for him to make a call to give me a complement when the IM window was sitting right in front of him.
Comment 1Comment 2
1 comment:
Post a Comment