For this assignment, I paid particular attention to how I communicated with my friends and family. There were two particularly weird incidents in which I used an inefficient form of communication to accomplish a task. On Saturday, as I was working on a problem set, I needed to borrow a ruler from my roommate. He was sitting right next to me, but instead of asking him directly, I instant messaged him on AIM. This took approximately 30 more seconds than it should have taken. On Sunday, I called my sister to let her know that I ordered some books for her. My intent was to simply notify her of my actions, but in the end, I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with her. In both cases, I spent more time than I really needed. My actions certainly did not fit in with media richness theory's demand for efficiency.
When I borrowed the ruler from my roommate, he was working on his own problem sets. I did not want to interrupt his concentration by asking him for a ruler. He was also wearing his headphones, making it rude to speak over his music. I thought an instant message would be more suitable. He can choose to either respond or ignore. Since I was asking a favor, I wanted to make this communication as modest as possible. Consequently, I asked him, “Hey, if you're not busy, can I borrow your ruler?” The locus of this message was the self. The valence of my request is unclear, but it does not have much bearing on my decision to instant message. O'Sullivan's model predicted my choice by favoring mediated channels for episodes regarding the self.
Phoning my sister is actually pretty rare for me. I only phone my mother and father, due to their technological inexperience. I usually instant message all my other more technologically adept relatives. However, in this incident, I wanted to make sure she knew about the status of her books. At first, this did not seem like a very equivocal task, but I turned it into one by considering all possible points of confusion (e.g. when I ordered, when they will be arriving, how media mail works). According to O'Sullivan's model, I was supposed to minimize costs, but I spent more time than was necessary. The locus was my sister and the valence was positive. Therefore, according to O'Sullivan, I would prefer a less mediated means of communicating. Unmediated interaction was impossible given the distance. Instead, I choose to phone her since the media richness provided more cues and thus “felt” more unmediated.
Comments:
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-3-to-text-or-to-call-that-is.html
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/3-feelings-over-internet.html
1 comment:
Hi Henry, I’ve always found the “roommates-instant-messaging-each-other” scenario pretty fascinating. Last year, my roommate would IM me quite often and I would just laugh and then answer him in person. I’m pretty sure he was just doing it for novelty’s sake, but you actually bring up a pretty legitimate reason (one that is governed by O’Sullivan) for your intentions of doing so. I think this follows the Media Richness Theory because of the simplicity of the question at hand. However, I think both theories are somewhat void in this situation because you are living in the same room as your partner in communication. But alas, he had headphones on, so I guess further research must be carried out.
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