3 Statistics Meeting

My statistics grade is based solely on a group project that we work on for almost the entire semester. My group of four consists of one of my friends and two other people in my class that I am unfamiliar with. I found out who was in my group when I received an email the other day from the other girl in my group. She is a freshman who decided to take the initiative to introduce herself and ask if the rest of us had any ideas for our project topic. Then, each of the remaining members of the group responded to her email. My response suggested that maybe we should meet up as a group soon since not all of us know each other. To this I received an invitation to meet up after class on Tuesday for a few minutes to meet and discuss possible topic choices.

There are two different ways to think of Media Richness Theory in relation to the situation that I have just outlined. The first option is to look at the email conversations that took place in the past few days. I only know one other person in my group, so this email conversation was the first time I have ever spoken to either of the other two members of my group. After receiving the original email, I immediately logged onto Facebook and scoped out my other two partners. While an email can definitely be impersonal, there are still ways to form impressions of others by this medium. Upon the reception of the first email, I believed this freshman girl to be a leader who likes to take the initiative. This was my initial perception; however, she may have been told by our TA to email the remaining members of the group. I have no idea. Anyway, the Media Richness Theory says that we should choose a leaner medium for unequivocal tasks, tasks that are unambiguous. In terms of the email communication that went on with my group, we set up a meeting through a lean channel. It would have been completely unnecessary to write a paragraph describing ourselves to each other through email when we can simply set a meeting time through this medium and meet face to face at a later time. The Media Richness Theory is definitely supported in this situation because using a lean medium such as email works perfectly for setting up an unequivocal task like a meeting time.

The other way to look at this situation is to view it from the opposite side of the Media Richness Theory. While the email serves to set up the meeting place and time, the meeting itself serves as a richer medium for equivocal and more ambiguous conversation. Like previously stated, it is hard to have an actual conversation with someone over an email, especially when it comes to a first introduction. Similar to our first blog assignments, we introduced ourselves, but we have no pictures to names and no real concept of what people are like in real life. When emailing in a situation like mine or writing our first blogs, it is hard to tell if someone is nervous when they first meet you. Are they shaking? Do they now know what to say? In a richer medium such as a face to face encounter, my partners and I will be able to introduce ourselves quickly before we start to plan out our project. It is so much easier to introduce ourselves in a face to face encounter because it is a richer medium since we have more multiplicity and availabilty of cues along with a more personalized message and language variety since we will be communicating face to face.

Because we were only originally setting up a meeting time, it was easiest to use a leaner medium such as email rather than a richer medium. The Medium Richness Theory confirms this by saying that it may be better for use a leaner medium sometimes. My encounter with the members of my statistics group only proves this theory further. It was easiest to plan a meeting using a leaner medium as a way to avoid awkward moments and hellos that would happen in a richer medium, then a richer medium for the more equivocal introductions that are much better done in a richer medium situation than a leaner one.

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