Assignment 3: To Text or To Call? that is the question.

In the last five minutes I have picked up my cell phone twice. The first was to make a call to a friend to ask him for help with an assignment. The second was to text a girlfriend to ask if she was attending a dinner later tonight. In both instances I was communicating with a person to get an answer to a question. In the former case, I chose the synchronous route with vocal cues to find out the answer to my question that I don’t need to know until tomorrow. In the latter case, I chose the asynchronous route without verbal cues to find out the answer to a question that I need to know in the next hour. While my choice doesn’t seem to make much common sense, since the text may never get answered (it’s been 10 minutes and she hasn’t responded), while a phone call would most likely be answered immediately, looking at it from the point of the Media Richness Theory, it is actually quite logical.

The Media Richness Theory asserts that one chooses lean media for less equivocal tasks. In the case of the text message, it was just that. I asked my friend if she was going to dinner, and all she needed to do was to respond yes or no. Although I needed her to respond within an hour (she texted back 15 minutes after I first messaged her), and calling her may have been a faster way to find out if she was going, I still chose to text message. Why? Well, because text messages generally have good availability of feedback, and since it was a simple question, it made more sense to me that I should text her, rather than call. Also, since it was a simple yes/no question, and I didn’t need multiple cues, there was really no need for me to use a richer communication medium.

The phone call case, on the other hand was a more equivocal task. I was completing an assignment for a class, and I had a question that I needed another classmate to answer. The question wasn’t simply a yes/no one, it was an inquiry that needed a bit of explanation. Because, of that, I chose to contact my friend via telephone, because the verbal cues would help him better explain what I needed to do. Although my question didn’t need to be answered for a day, it really didn’t matter if I asked my friend today or tomorrow, because I would still need to hear his voice for the explanation. Either way I would have ended up calling him. My question required an answer that was both synchronous and verbal, and therefore I chose the rich communication medium of the telephone.

As one can see from my two examples, even though time played a factor in getting a response from my two friends, I still choose which communication medium to use based on the richness that was required in the answers I needed. For the yes/no question, I chose to text, while for the in depth question, I chose to call. My examples demonstrate how I sought an optimal match between the equivocalness of my task and the richness of the medium I chose to use, which is based on the Media Richness Theory.