#4: Option 1, Truth or Lie

I used message based deception for option one in sharing about my travel memories. For the rich media channel, I spoke with the friend over the phone, while I told the false travel memory through Instant Messaging.

In both cases, my friend could not tell the difference of which was the lie and which was the truth. The story I lied about was a smaller story within a travel experience that really occurred. Therefore that probably contributed to why it was so difficult to tell the difference. When asked to pick one, my friend chose correctly.

For the false story that I told through the leaner media channel, I tried to be very detailed with my descriptions and illustrate my memory with words through my IM conversation. I also purposely chose the leaner media source because personally, I’m very bad at lying and most of the time all my friends are able to distinguish my truths and lies. Therefore, going along with the Social Distant Theory, I felt uncomfortable to lie over the phone because I was afraid the friend would catch me off guard with a detailed question, or get a cue from the tone of my voice. Ironically, my friend thought that because I was so detailed oriented with my story, that it was the false one, because it seemed for like I was describing a historical event rather than a personal experience.

The second travel memory I shared was through the richer media channel of using a phone conversation. Using the phone, I was able to talk freely and naturally about my experience on a family vacation to the Bahamas. The friend was able to tell how much I enjoyed it through cues such as the tone of my voice, how easily I told the story, as well as how happy I sounded while telling the story. For this second experience, I feel that according to the Media Richness Theory, I should have used an even richer channel such as face to face because I wanted the experience to be more equivocal. Personally, I use a lot of hand gestures and facial cues to portray my feelings and meanings; therefore in this case, I don’t think I followed the media richness theory in finding the optimal match between equivocally and richness. Overall though, even with less cues over the phone compared to ftf, my friend was able reallocate her cognitive resources into concentrating on my voice.

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Assignment 3: Posing

For this assignment, I posed as a 30 year old woman who was new to the internet. I entered an online chat room posing as this woman who has 2 children and a husband who has passed away. I appeared to be somewhat out of place in a chat room full of teens chatting away with surprising typing abilities and an excellent understanding of internet rhetoric. Using selective self-presentation from the view of a 30 year old internet chat room neophyte’s point-of-view was quite an interesting ordeal.

I figured that the age I portrayed would not seem too old, just a little internet illiterate. However, I was quite mistaken. It was practically like these users had never seen an online persona over the age of 20 in their lives. I got all different types of reactions, everything from laughing at my non-internet form of chatting to intriguing inquiries as to why I was in the chat room, and about my children and life. I observed that simply by using a slightly different vocabulary and sense of grammar than I would normally in such a situation, the ease at which I got them to believe my story was remarkable. I found that as I slipped more and more into the role, I began to see how unconscious selective self presentation might take place in another person as they take on an internet persona. The users in the chat room that did respond to my messages where surprisingly into this random conversation with a “30 year old woman.” The ability to portray oneself however one wishes to be perceived on the internet allows for us to become individuals and grab the attention of the chat at will.

As the discussion went on I found myself wondering how the persona I was presenting myself as would react to the various messages being sent in “her” direction were I actually her. It also made me wonder as to the type of person that might actually steal or fabricate identities online, and for what purpose they might do so. Plus, how different is fabricating an identity from just a more conscious form of self-presentation? Overall, I wondered as to the possibilities of a lack of verbal cues, and how many people really do remake themselves online because they are that unsatisfied with themselves. It provides an easy method for those who wish to be someone else.

Assignment #3: Text or Call, IM or FTF

After Thursdays class about the Media Richness Theory and O’Sullivan’s Model, I realized my actions communicating in everyday life often support both ideas.

Example 1: Saturday night my friends and I decided to have a few people over our apartment. We were all having a good time when suddenly my phone started to ring. As “Jessica calling” flashed across the screen, I realized that I forgot to invite her. Panicked, I immediately let the phone go to voicemail and instead sent a text message, “Hey sorry I missed your call, what are you up to tonight?” I did not think twice about texting because I wanted to communicate with Jess but knew it would be less akward than picking up the call.

O’Sullivans model asserts that people use communication technologies to help regulate impression management/self presentation. In my situation with Jess, picking up the phone would be more efficient, however I thought if she heard everyone in the background and realized I forgot, she would have a negative impression of me as a friend therefore I chose a leaner medium, text messaging. In this situation the valence was expected to be negative and the locus was myself and therefore I easily chose a mediated interaction further supporting O'Sullivan's Model. I felt as if texting was the "buffer" I needed to comfortably communicate in this situation.

Example 2: Today I was sitting in my room working on my homework, when I began thinking about the Career Fair tomorrow. I knew my roommate was also going so I decided to IM her, “What time are you going to the Career Fair?” Carrie, who was home at the time and has a room literally 10 feet away IMed me back with “Probably around 11.” I could have went into Carrie's room and asked her Face to Face but it was a simple, quick question and much easier to instant message despite her proximity.

According to the Media Richness Theory, we choose a rich media for more equivocal tasks and a leaner media less equivocal tasks. My situation with Carrie supports this theory because despite the fact she was 10 feet away I chose to IM her. If I went into her room, I would most likely go to ask her my question and end up chatting when I knew I had to finish my homework. IMing proved to be more efficient in this situation because I had a direct question the task was not ambiguous.

3 Who else is excited to see Steven Colbert?

I decided to describe two instances of media selection, both of which occurred yesterday morning. The following media selections involved myself and my friend, who was in charge of buying our Steven Colbert tickets at 9 am.

Since we wanted to get seats to see Colbert together, my friend decided she would sacrifice sleeping in Monday morning to get us tickets. I was up eating breakfast before my 10 am lecture, and decided to send her a text message: “don’t forget to get tickets for colbert!” I decided on this medium for a few reasons. First, it was the fastest way to contact her. I was in a hurry, getting dressed and ready for class, so I was concerned with reminding her with as little effort on my part as possible. Also, this specific communication had a pretty low equivocality – it was a simple reminder, rather than a vague message requiring further explanation. Thus, in accordance with the Media Richness Theory, I selected a lean medium in order to communicate a simple message efficiently and in a timely manner.

I left my cell phone in the living room to finish getting ready for class. When I was ready to go and putting the phone in my backpack, I saw that I had a message. I was expecting a reply in the form of a text message, if anything, just a simple “don’t worry about it” or “got it.” After all, my friend was in the same situation as me and had a class at 10. Instead, I had a missed call and voicemail, which said: “Hey, Eden. You need to answer your phone. Just wanted to let you know I came through for you – big time. We got front row seats!” Instantly I understood why she had decided to call me instead of send me another text message. This news is simply too good to be written down in some impersonal text message. In accordance with O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Model, the valence of the message, in this case positive, influenced my friend’s media selection. Despite the fact that a cell phone call was less efficient than a text message, my friend decided on the least mediated channel possible to convey this positive message with as much interaction as she could.

In sum, this situation yesterday shows that both the Media Richness Theory and the Impression Management Model can help in understanding someone’s media selection. I felt that these were two interesting differing media selections to discuss, but honestly, I just wanted to brag a little about my seats!

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3: Encounter with a badboy

The psychological space I decided to join for this assignment was a Yahoo Chat room named, ‘Flirts’. The reason I picked Yahoo chat is because in addition to a public chat room, you can also have a private chat with another person. Needing to make myself look like a cool girl who wants to chat, I selected my screen name to be ‘blueforyou84369’. After getting several private chat invitations as soon as I said that I was a female from California, I finally decided to chat with ‘badboy482’. Observing my comments after our conversation, I noticed various self-presentation tactics that I used to seem cool and attractive.

The self-description that I wished to provide was that I was a young and attractive girl who goes to a college in California. At first I introduced myself as being 24, but when ‘badboy’ said that he was just 19, I quickly changed my story and told him that I was actually 18. Oddly, he believed me and still kept chatting with me. The way I convinced him that I was in college was by making comments like, “Ahh.. I have so much biology homework to do and I have to go to Eric’s party.” The social associations with biology and partying worked in my favor as he started talking about balancing his academic life with his social life. Furthermore, I also observed myself employing attitude expression tactics by making flirtatious comments and making him talk more. I hoped that this way I would seem more attractive and interesting to ‘badboy.’ Again, to convince him that I was from California, I tried to associate myself with activities such as surfing, para sailing and being a big San Francisco 49ers fan. In addition to social associations, I also used sets, props and lighting tactics to solidify my online image of being a female. I accomplished this by picking a feminine screen name such as ‘blueforyou’ and used pink, Comic Sans MS font.

Since this was not a verbal, FtF conversation, my self-presentation tactics were heavily affected by the psychological space. Through a chat I was able to change my age, act more immature and was easily able to convince the other person that I went to a college in California. Also, since the person would not be able to hear any verbal cues, I was able to switch my age without him getting suspicious. Through this interesting exercise, I was not only able to learn how one can manipulate self-presentation tactics using different psychological spaces, but I was also scared to see how well I can behave like a female online.

3. For efficiency’s sake

For this assignment, I chose to describe two instances of media selection. The first instance was when I decided to call home to tell my family about a long, terrible day when everything went wrong. I believe that my decision to call rather than text or email is a good example of the Media Richness Theory. When I decided to call home and let them know about my day, I made sure that my media was as rich as possible. I wanted them to share in every emotion and taste of the pain that I left from a day that started at 6am and didn’t end until 5am. I wanted them to hear the scratchiness of voice and my sleep deprived tone. I really had no motivation to correspond with them besides to make myself feel better and give them a quick laugh so efficiency was not a huge concern for me. Before I made the call, I made sure to wait until I was in an area with excellent Sprint service and that I had nothing significant to do that might distract me from my call.

Another instance when I chose my media was when I sent my friend a text during class. This instance supports the Media Richness Theory as well. This time efficiency was my top priority. We were both cramped in a packed lecture hall and were at opposite ends of the room. I could see my friend but I could not speak with him, given our distance apart. All I needed to know from him was what he was doing after lecture. The possible means of communication were limited at the time. I could call him but for the sake of being polite and not interrupting the class I would have had to get up and leave the room to make the call. He then would have to get up and leave the room to receive the call. If we both got up and left the room to use our phones, then we would both be in the hallway together and there would no longer be a need to call in the first place. I would then have to explain to him why I took time out of lecture to talk to him rather than wait until after lecture. Calling would be a time consuming process considering that all I wanted to know was a small blurb of information. With the efficiency of texting, I found out what my friend was doing in a couple of seconds.

I find that for my personal correspondence with others, efficiency usually takes precedence of most things and this in turn supports the Media Richness Theory.

3 Techno Moms and Buddies Come Over

So instead of going online and pretending to be someone else, I figured I would be my usual self and analyze how I actually interacted with people. For my first interaction, I had to communicate with my mom just to talk about some financial stuff and explain how the new Cornell pay online system works. I could either send her an email with a link (which I think happens anyway when you sign up, but that's besides the point) and give her brief instructions as to how to do it, or I could make a (hopefully) brief phone call and deal with my mom and judge her reactions and be able to better help with her inevitable confusion. My mom is not particularly fond of computers or technology, so seeing her reaction to the fact that she has no choice but to use a complex form of technology is high comedy. Partially for this reason, but also because i felt it would be more effective to walk her through it step by step, I opted to use the phone. There was far less confusion, and in this case using less media and although using the direct voice interaction over the phone increased the richness, and also increased the interaction time, it also presumably decreased the time I would have to spend in the future fixing and clearing up the situation of paying online. Although the valence was potentially negative due to her disdain towards online activities, I feel that increasing the media richness and being able to walk her through it in person would have been even more efficient.

For my second interaction I had a situation very similar to Selina’s down below. Instead of me going to visit someone, I wanted to find out if my buddy was still coming to visit me this next weekend. Calling him would have been too rich and taken up too much time. There was no need to dedicate 10-15 minutes to a yes or no question. I could have sent him an email since there was no real need for an immediate response, but again that would take too much of my time between having to look up his email address and everything. I was already on aim, and I was looking to waste some time, and I wanted to keep the interaction to a minimum, so I figured sending an IM was the way to go. By keeping the richness to a low level, I managed to get a quick response to a quick question, and not have to worry wasting too much time. If I was looking to tell him he couldn’t come, maybe email would have been the best idea due to the negative valence. But I wouldn’t do that to one of my friends.

3: Media Selection. I'll be Esther another time.

I enjoy posing as an 80 year old woman with Alzheimer’s as much as the next guy, but for this assignment I have decided to describe two instances of media selection I have recently engaged in. My decisions for both communications tasks were largely based on media richness theory, as you will see.

Yesterday I needed advice about selling some of my photographs. I have some pictures that a newspaper is interested in buying, but I have no idea about how much they are worth, and how to go about the sale. I did a little investigating on the internet and was able to find a well written blog by a professional photographer. He deals with this type of stuff all the time, so I decided to contact him to see if he had anything helpful to tell me. On his website there were two channels with which to contact him. One was telephone and the other was e-mail. I decided that for this situation, my best bet would be e-mail, because it was the richest medium for this communication task. In an e-mail I don’t have a certain amount of time to convey my ideas and thoughts, I am able to think about what I want to ask and word my questions in a coherent and intelligent way. Not to say that this isn’t possible over the phone, but I feel that it’s easier to get better answers when I have time to write the questions down, while at the same time giving the recipient more time to think of answers without putting them on the spot. Another reason this medium was right for my task is that I didn’t have 20 minutes to devote to a phone conversation; I was in between classes, and I had about 5 or 10 minutes to sit down and type. The final reason that e-mail was the optimal medium for my task is that I am now able to go back and read the response as many times as I want. If I forget something that the photographer said, I can open the e-mail again to refresh my memory. On the phone I would basically have one shot at getting the advice, because words are usually lost the moment they are spoken. The photographer ended up giving me great advice by writing a thorough and detailed reply that will be very helpful to me.

Another instance of media selection goes back a couple of weeks. I had spoken to a prospective employer about the possibly of getting a job at their place of business. They e-mailed me back saying that there were two positions available, and I could just send my resume to them by e-mail. This however was not how I chose to approach the task. I decided to hand deliver my resume, rather than sending it electronically. I made this choice because I wanted to make face to face contact with the person who was deciding whether or not to hire me. If I solely used e-mail for this task, my communication with the employer would be vague and ambiguous. Speaking with the employer in person allowed me to personalize the experience by giving and receiving cues and making positive impressions that simply cannot be made just through e-mail. I was able to get instant feedback from the employer, and in the end I got the job.

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Assignment #3: Hmm...what MEDIUM should I use next??

Before the lecture about media selection, I never realized how many decisions I had to make daily regarding selective media. For example, I was trying to let my brother know I was coming home next weekend. I was deciding if it was better to call him on the phone or simply IM him. It didn’t take me long to decide which medium to choose. I had a problem set due the next day, and I had to get up at 7:30am for a research meeting. Since it was already 2 a.m., my decision occurred almost instantaneously. Obviously, I decided to IM him.

This example of IMing versus calling my brother supports the Media Richness Theory. I chose to use a lean media for less equivocal tasks (efficiency) because I simply wanted him to know I was coming home. I knew if we were to talk on the phone, I would be asking him how work was and he would ask me how school was. From experience, I knew I was going to be on the phone with him for at least 30 minutes. On the other hand, by using instant messaging, I knew that he would respond quickly, as if we had a phone conversation, but without having to talk about school and work, supporting the Media Richness Theory about the availability of feedback (richness). I was simply looking to have a quick and efficient conversation and succeeded in doing so.

In a second instance, I was trying to figure out what was the best way to catch up with one of my friends from another university. We decided to have a videoconference because it allows FtF and CMC interaction simultaneously. I wanted to choose a medium that was rich for more equivocal tasks and allowed me to gain as much information from my friend as possible during our videoconference. The idea of using videoconferencing as the selected medium was a good choice because of the availability of instant feedback, the availability of multiple cues such as verbal and visual cues like body language, and message personalization. I felt as though we were sitting in a cafe talking to each other, although in reality, she's hundreds of miles away. Although videoconferencing isn’t exactly a FtF interaction, it includes many of the cues of the FtF interaction that CMC simply doesn’t, such as vocal and nonverbal cues. Videoconferencing serves as a very rich medium that brings a fusion of FtF and CMC together into one medium, which again supports the ideas of the media richness theory.

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Assignment 3: My Media Selection

For this assignment I’ve chosen the second option to describe different instances of media selection. The first instance was on Sunday morning when I called one of my friends to tell her about the night before. It wasn’t anything bad or embarrassing; it was just a funny story that happened to me the night before. In this instance, the locus would be self, and the valence would be negative. According to the Impression Management Model, I would be least likely to choose a lean media if this were the case, and that’s how I felt. I wanted to tell my story and get instant feedback and be able to hear the tone of the voice on the other line, rather than do it over Instant Messenger (funny stories are never as funny when you tell them online anyway). This particular instance could also be used to support the Media Richness Theory, since calling my friend was the most efficient medium I could use (it was pouring Sunday and she doesn’t live too close).
The second instance I’m going to talk about didn’t happen to me. One of my friends from home, Kayla, was mad at our other friend for going to a concert with her ex-boyfriend and wanted to confront her about it. According to the Media Richness Theory, she would confront our other friend either face-to-face or on the phone because it is a more equivocal task. However, Kayla chose to talk to the other girl online, which is what the Impression Management Model suggests. When the locus is other and the valence is negative, a person is much more likely to use a mediated channel to communicate. These two examples, as well as other conversations I have observed, demonstrate that the Impression Management Model is a more accurate portrayal of how people actually communicate.

3 "Feelings" over the Internet

For awhile, I had been synchronously chatting on msn with a friend from Texas. We were acquaintances from mutual friends, but never talked face to face so our friendship has developed solely over the internet. From chatting on a regular basis, we became “close” friends and grew comfortable enough to use a web cam. This was the ideal rich channel for us since we had a distance barrier. Granted it was not entirely videoconferencing since my microphone did not work, so our cues were primarily visual and partly audible (from his computer). Now that we were actually able to see each other react to the messaging, I became more aware of what I was saying and how I reacted to the conversation. However, the combination of our closeness and chatting/web camming caused him to admit that he developed feelings for me which I did not reciprocate. I was in complete shock because I did not understand how feelings could arise from communicating only on the internet. After this, things became extremely awkward and I almost instantly stopped using the web cam with him. Due to this series of events, along with workload, our messaging became less frequent so he began emailing me, in which I reluctantly, but cautiously, responded.

According to the O’Sullivan model, this scenario occurred in the self locus and dealt with both positive and negative valences. In the beginning, when we started becoming better friends, we were in the positive valence and used rich channels (videoconferencing) to communicate. As described in the Media Richness Theory, during this time of web camming, it was more efficient for us to use a rich media because we spoke frequently and for long periods. However, once I had confessed to him that I saw our relationship as purely friendship, our communication media downgraded to emailing (lean channel). Just as in the O’Sullivan model, I definitely felt emailing was a more suitable media because I became overly cautious in my replies to ensure that I was not giving him a wrong impression. Not only did it allow me buffer time to come up with response from his accusations, but it also put me in control of the direction of the conversation. This overall experience closely reflected the O’Sullivan model because of the dealings with the self.

3 Crazy Kids and Their Newfangled "Interweb"

Entering an online chat room is a weird enough experience for me in general. However, entering a Yahoo chat as a 63-year old male from Arizona takes the weirdness factor to a whole new level. Upon entering, I was immediately greeted by a couple of the friendlier users, but the truly interesting aspect of my interactions in the chat room began when I identified myself as 63 years old. Immediately, more people started talking to me. It was not, however, the same interest that one might find in a regular hormone-crazed chat room filled with teens. It was much more the interest one would expect to see people display when discovering a novelty.

It quickly became clear that a 63-year old man is not a common sight in any chat room. Without thinking, I began to embrace my concocted role, making sure to use proper grammar and punctuation in all my sentences, and to avoid the net jargon so common in the rooms. As soon as I started doing that, people started treating me as if I were a babe in the woods, so to speak. They seemed to be making the assumption that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and my presence appeared to be entertaining to a good portion of them.

After I had finished “puttering around” the chat room, I took some time to look back at my interactions in the chat environment and found some surprising observations. First was that I hadn’t fully embraced my constructed identity until I had revealed my “age” and people had started to treat me accordingly. This is very clearly the behavioral confirmation we talked about, and I was surprised to see how immediately it had impacted me: quickly after people acknowledged my age, my age-appropriate internet naïveté kicked in. Furthermore, I went out of my way to over-act the part. It seemed at times that I was making sure not to even remotely suggest any sort of familiarity with the chat room world, even though it is totally conceivable for a 63-year old to have such experience. Through selective self-presentation, I was boiling the essence of my character down to one key aspect, namely, no knowledge of net speak or chat room etiquette and making absolutely sure not to let the occasional “k” or “wut? “ slip in.

A last thing that was very intriguing to me is how weird the overall experience was. I’ve only rarely been in a chat room and have never deceived online to the level I was attaining here. For me, it was hard to resist the urge to fall into the normal chat-speak and fit into the room. The fact that it was harder for me to stand out than to blend in was very interesting and I think it brings up an interesting question regarding the idea of selective self-presentation: What is it that makes one human want to deceive another to the degree that one sees online?

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3 Media Selection

Making choices about which of the many different types of media to use in which situation is something that I didn’t realize I did so many times on a daily basis. One choice came when I was in a fight with a close friend of mine this weekend. We were on the phone and all of the yelling and trying to talk over one another in an attempt to have our point of view heard was getting us no where. After we hung up because we were both so frustrated and feeling as though we weren’t being understood, we began to text and surprisingly our communication went a lot more smoothly and we were able to resolve our fight. The conversation on the phone was too heated and there wasn’t a chance for us to really think about what we wanted to say and get it out how we wanted to say it without being interrupted. The text messaging acted as a buffer in our conversation. I believe this supports O’Sullivan’s model and allowed us to effectively communicate because we chose a medium where we had interactional control.

Another choice came when my friend from home broke up with her long time boyfriend. I saw that her relationship status changed to single on facebook and I was surprised and concerned. So instead of texting her or messaging her on facebook just to see if everything was okay, I chose to call her and see how she was doing. I was really happy that I did that because I was able to hear the tone of her voice and the hesitations etc. that made all the difference in understanding and responding in order to make her feel better. This supports the Media Richness Theory because of how important the verbal cues and available feedback were in choosing the richer medium of the telephone over text.

3 - Act Your Age Buddy

Being a separated forty-year-old mother with a son named Bryant did not stop ChrisVA from wanting to have some online fun. However, even more surprising was the fact that thirty-eight-year-old ChrisVA is now married to a woman he has been with for over 18 years. Nevertheless, Jeremy still came searching for a woman to help his “not so hot sex life.”

Unfortunately for ChrisVA, since I was a forty-year-old responsible mother with integrity and self-respect, I was more interested in acting my age and being the sophisticated woman I was supposed to be. I quickly learned that acting forty was a little harder than I expected it to be so I really had to think through my methods to make him believe I was truly who I said I was. Since we were talking in a private chat, which is an example of lean medium, I had to take advantage of the limited visual clues that would cause him to judge and stereotype me. Therefore, I made sure that I typed in complete sentences, used correct grammar and was careful with my word choice. I refrained from shortening words and questioned what any Internet slang meant like any other clueless forty-year-old.

Then, when we started talking about our personal lives, I made sure to stick to very vague and open-ended questions where I could easily reciprocate with an ambiguous answer and some story to go along with it. I also tried to stick to topics that I thought a forty and thirty-eight-year-old would discuss. This got a little difficult when we talked about how hard marriages were. Yet, when I asked about what his favorite age was, it was a lot of fun because I got to imagine what I want to have done by the time I am forty, except of course being separated.

Being in an online psychological space really allowed me to protect my anonymity and this lie regarding this fantasy life I was telling ChrisVA about. Since I was not face-to-face, I had time to think about my answers and choose my words wisely, and my facial expressions were not there to give me away. Furthermore, I got to wrestle between my ideal, ought, actual and true self. Since I was talking to myself twenty years from now, I made sure to incorporate a combination of the qualities I hope to possess at that point, the qualities I feel like I should possess at forty-years old, some of the qualities that I possess now as a nineteen-year-old, and then a little mystery regarding the parts of me that have not been revealed yet. It was a very exciting, yet somewhat depressing experience because it was interesting to think about the future, yet I hope that I am not a separated mother dating online at forty-years old.

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Assignment #3: My Media Selection

This weekend, I had a very interesting interaction with a friend over the psychological space of instant messaging (IM). I was struggling with a homework assignment in a class we took together so I decided to IM her with in-depth questions and in return, was looking for detailed answers. I am a person who likes to multitask as much as possible. Naturally, I choose IM to work out the difficulties of our homework so I would be able to choose when I would carefully read her answers in order to do other things—such as checking my email, making some dinner, getting ready to go out, etc.. After saving the conversation, this psychological space provided me with a recorded discussion to look back on and thoroughly think through when I actually sat down to do the assignment. For me, IMing was the best choice because it allowed me to multitask. If I had called her, I would not have been able to multitask since I would have had to listen attentively and I would not have had a recorded discussion to refer to later. A face-to-face interaction would not have been efficient as I may have forgotten a question to ask and the time it would take to walk to her apartment, discuss the homework, then walk back to my apartment would be poor time management.

For this specific instance I would argue that although instant messaging is considered to be a synchronous psychological space because it is based on real-time responses, I personally used it as an asynchronous space by giving delayed responses so I could take my time and choose when to read her answers. This case would disprove O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Theory because the need I had to get detailed responses that I could use at my convenience was much more important to me than my self-presentation. However, my situation supports the Media Richness Theory. Since instant messaging has a quick availability of feedback but lacks multiplicity of cues, it is viewed as a lean medium. Additionally, the task I was executing was very straightforward and not equivocal, or vague, at all. Thus, I was being very efficient.

As I was working on homework tonight (Monday), the people who live below me where blasting music as usual. I was pretty bothered by this because it was a Monday night. I have put up with this since classes started so I was getting pretty fed up. However, I did not want to sound like a loser who studies all the time so I decided to ask them to turn their music down by text messaging one of the people who lived in the apartment. They text messaged me back with an apology as I heard the music lower.

In this instance, I was in fact worried about my self-presentation amongst the people who lived below me because I did not want them to change the social butterfly impression I had already formed of myself to them, to one of a studious nerd. Therefore, the media I selected supports O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Theory because I chose a lean channel to carefully choose my words as I would not have had the time or option in a face-to-face interaction that may have ended up costing me my preferred impression. In addition, my situation disproved the Media Richness Theory because I was less interested in how efficient my task was and more interested about the clarity of my message in order to avoid skewing the impression they have of me.

3 Being a Flake: Text vs. Phone?

Due to my recent decision to add unlimited text messages into my monthly cell phone plan, constant choices between sending a text and placing a phone call have been bugging me. I am going to examine two instances over the past several days where I have cancelled plans—however, the first instance was through a text message while the second was via a telephone call.

Some of my friends and I had brunch plans on Sunday at 12:30pm, but I realized I had a radio DJ training at 1pm, so I texted one friend, Lily, with “can’t do brunch today. don’t miss me too much”, where I shortly received the blunt reply “k”. I believe this is pretty consistent with both the Media Richness Theory and O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Model. In my humble opinion, my text message was very clear, and it did not need further non-verbal cues to be understood. Canceling my brunch plan is a very unambiguous, equivocal task—and even though it has a slightly negative valence with a locus on myself but no real, serious emotions were at stake here. The brunch plan involved a small group of people—so my not being present did not have a crucial effect on the events at hand, or need explaining.

The second instance of conscious medium choice was when I called my friend Alex to tell him I could not attend his transhumanist club meeting. It was the first meeting of a club he had just organized and received university affiliation for—he was pretty attached to this meeting and I told him before that I would attend. Additionally, my reasons for not attending are not entirely concrete. Essentially, I was very busy. I had to pick up a new book from a store, pay my rent, do some assignments, and well, take a nap. Thinking about the situation, my primary reason for calling Alex was to soften my negative self-focused “confession”-type communication and emphasize that I would come to his next meetings to make up for my actions. All this would have been too length and less personal in a text message. This experience perfectly falls into O’Sullivan’s model, and because I was attempting to add ambiguity to my actions—trying to seem like an ambiguous flake rather than an obvious flake—it falls in with the Media Richness Theory. There is one aspect of this experience that I find interesting; I almost sent a text message purely because I was so busy, but I realized that I cared too much about upsetting him. I guess, appropriately, if one doesn’t care about the impression he or she will make, the models will become less relevant.

Comment 1

Comment 2

3 Wow, I'm actually pretty inefficient

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

3: Lean or Rich?

After Thursday's lecture, I really began to notice how and why I choose the mediums of communication that I use on a daily basis. For instance, this past weekend I decided to confront a friend about an issue that has been building up between us. After the first few weeks of living in our house together, the excitement settled and the reality of chores finally set in. Before arriving in the fall, I thought our biggest problem would be the five of us girls trying to share one bathroom. Soon enough I realized the importance of everybody doing a portion of the house chores. One girl, let's just call her Molly, seemed to be the one whom everybody cleaned up after. As my frustration built up, I decided to write her a note instead of confronting her face to face. According to O'Sullivan's Impression Management Model, lean channels of communication provide a medium in which one can better manage self-presentation. This goes against the Media Richness Theory which states that people choose a medium in which they can be most efficient. O'Sullivan's model shows that I chose a lean medium because of the expected negative outcome. By communicating with her in an asynchronous way, I was able to avoid a face to face interaction in which I would have to deal with her reaction.

In addition to this instance, I also noticed the significance of my choice of medium when I called my mom last weekend. I called her after my fitness testing to tell her how excited I was that I had passed the running tests. According to the Impression Management Model, people are likely to choose media rich channels, like telephone conversations, when they have something positive to say about themselves. The Media Richness Theory also came into play because in this instance, self-presentation was not as issue. I merely wanted to boast about my accomplishments. I wanted the most efficient medium of communication and a synchronous conversation so I could also quickly hear her excitement as well.

3 My Media Selection

Two recent instances occurred in my life where media selection played a major role. The first instance deals with my living situation for next year. Ten girls including myself really wanted to live in a certain house next year. We called the landlord and he told us we were second on the waitlist. He also said there was a very good chance that we would get the house. He called us everyday with positive updates, and we called him with our questions. When the deadline came as to whether the group on the waitlist before us actually signed for the house, we called the landlord numerous times unable to get a hold of him. The next day, he sent us an email that stated we did not get the house. This occurrence strongly supports O’Sullivan’s model. When the landlord was talking to us before the house we wanted was taken, he used the phone, a synchronous form of communication. However, when we did not get the house, instead of using the phone to tell us the bad news, he used email, an asynchronous form of communication. The first hypothesis of O’Sullivan’s model is when valence is negative, one prefers mediated interaction. The email acted as a buffer.

The second occurrence where media selection played a role in my life was when I got in a fight with my roommate. We live in a two-bedroom apartment and refused to talk to one another. As I was on working on my computer one day, I receive an instant message from my roommate. I thought this was extremely weird considering she was only ten feet away. However, I responded and we worked out our fight via instant message. This might be a stretch, but this instance supports the Media Richness Theory. We know that Media Richness theory is the optimal match between equivocality of a communication task and the richness of the medium. To work out our fight, we definitely needed to communicate using a synchronous mode. Most people would just talk out this sort of fight. Looking back, however, I realized that instant message was the most efficient source of media to work out our fight. My roommate and myself needed a synchronous mode of communication. We, however, could not actually talk to each other because we would just scream at one another and accomplish nothing. In conclusion, instant message was the most efficient way of communication between the two of us, and this supports the Media Richness Theory.

Assignment #3, Managing My Media: 2 stories, 2 separate choices

When I checked my planner yesterday and realized that I wouldn’t be able to go to the Bills-Patriots game this year I was devastated. However, my own self-pity quickly faded into the background as I realized one of my friends had already bought the tickets with his money so that we could sit together. Not only would I have to break the news that I could not accompany him for an afternoon of grilling various animals during our pre-game tailgate session and chest painted debauchery in subzero temperatures during the game, but I had to let him know that he had to find some way to get rid of my ticket. All in all, despite this being one of my close friends, I felt very awkward about backing out of such an important event, especially because we had talked about it all throughout the summer. I got out my cell phone to break the news and dialed the number. But something stopped me from allowing the call to go through. After pausing for a few minutes to contemplate how to best put it, I opened up my phone and sent a text message.

Earlier this week, I went down to the gorges to enjoy the last rays of sunshine before Ithaca winter shrouds the campus in darkness. One of the people I was with fell and chipped her tooth on the rocks. It was one of the scariest moments I have had here at Cornell. She had to go to the hospital, and be carried out on a backboard. Later that day I received the news that she was in fact fine and just had to get some stitches. I knew that despite our constant reassurances to the contrary, she felt like she had ruined our day and was very embarrassed about slipping on the rocks. I wanted to contact her, but I didn’t want to force her to have the same conversation she was undoubtedly having with every one of her other friends. I was about to send her a text when I changed my mind and decided that regardless of my reservations, it was important that I call her.

The reason that I chose these two situations in which I was forced to make a media selection was that both were ambiguous. I find that when I want to ask someone to grab lunch at Ivy room while on campus, I sometimes text and sometimes call. Whatever I choose, I never spend any time thinking about which medium I will use, and certainly don’t see any secret psychological phenomenon that explains why I went with one over the other. However, in ambiguous situations, I always think just as hard about how I will communicate as I do about what I will say when I eventually do make contact. I found that my media selection choices were most consistent with O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Model. In the first situation, where I had to let one of my friends know that he had to find another mentally insane person who would agree to stand outside in the snow without a shirt on for the greater part of 3 hours, I characterized it as a confession. The valance was negative and the locus was on myself. I therefore decided to use texting over a phone call in order to establish a buffer with a mediated medium of communication. In the second situation when I wanted to check on the condition of a friend, I characterize it as a ‘praise’ situation as it pertains to O’Sullivan’s model. The focus and purpose of the call was on her and while the topic may have not been cheery, it was certainly not an accusatory call. The concern that I wanted to show could not be conveyed using a text message or email. According to Media Richness Theory, because both situations were ambiguous, it would have been most efficient for me to use a mediated method in both situations. However, Daft and Lengel fail to take into account that communication is not analogous to running a competitive business; it’s not all about efficiency.

http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-3-posing.html

http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/lean-or-rich.html

Assignment #3: When to Call Home and When to Just Email?

This weekend my friends and I signed a lease to sublet in Collegetown next semester. However, before I could sign I needed to contact home to ask my parents about transferring money into my account so that I could write a check for the security deposit. I know that some people rarely call home when they are away at college, and other people call home everyday. I fall somewhere in the middle, as I seem to call once a week…maybe a little less. The reason I don’t choose to call home more frequently is that whenever I do both my parents insist on talking with me and at least forty minutes seem to go by before I can get them to end the conversation. Though I know they just like to talk so much because they miss me, their calls can sometimes be more of an inconvenience when I have lots of work to do.

So on Friday afternoon I had to choose whether I really had time to call my parents, when all I wanted to do was ask them a simple question. Because I had a lot of work that I was trying to accomplish before going out on Friday evening, I chose to email my parents. All I had to ask them was if they could please transfer the specific amount of money into my account. My decision to use email in this situation demonstrates the Media Richness Theory. I only needed my parents to answer a simple question, so the most efficient way to contact them was via email. I selected a lean media because the task had little to no equivocalness. I just needed my parents to respond to the one question at hand, so I did not need a richer channel of communication that would encourage them to keep talking and keep me from my work.

My parents received my email and promptly responded and transferred money into my account. Using this lean media enabled me to write my security deposit check, and it also allowed me to spend forty extra minutes on homework instead of talking to them at an inconvenient time. Come Sunday evening however, I had finished most of my work and needed a study break. Knowing that my parents would want to know how the lease signing went, I decided to call them on the phone. I chose a rich media because I knew that my parents would not just want to know that the lease was signed; they would want to know all the details. As the Media Richness Theory supports, I chose a rich channel of communication for this more equivocal task. The synchronicity of our conversation was important because I was able to immediately answer my parents’ many questions. I could also respond to the multiplicity of cues that I interpreted in their voices as I explained what the apartment looked like. In choosing when to email and call my parents I matched the medium and the social task to use the most efficient form of communication just as the Media Richness Theory states.


Comments:
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-3-my-media-selection_11.html
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/lean-or-rich.html

Assignment No. 3: Media Selection

Individuals manage their impressions through the use of various self-presentational tactics. By managing self-descriptions; attitude expressions; nonverbal behavior; social associations; and, sets, props, and lighting, individuals can manage the information that they present to others. With the emergence of newer and easier communication technologies, however, social psychologists have recently questioned the role of technology in communication. In recent research, entitled “What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Me: Impression Management Functions of Communication Channels in Relationships,” O’Sulllivan repositions the study on communication technologies. In his “Impression Management Model,” O’Sullivan hypothesizes that individuals actively seek specific media channels to manage their self-presentations. In contrast with the dated “Media Richness Theory,” which states that individuals seek to reduce equivocality through the selection of richer media channels to match interactional needs, O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Model, states that the selection of an interactional channel is an effective complementary strategy in self-presentation.
As stated in the Impression Management Model, three factors guide channel preferences: interactional control, symbolism, and social skill. The interactional control factor plays a significant role in media selection because it explains how the channel characteristics shape the conversational episode. Secondly, the symbolic meaning of a channel concerns the meaning of the use of the channel, outside of the content of the conversation; and, lastly, the social skills factor accounts for one’s ability to manage interactions competently through the technical skills of using the channel.
I have recently used two very different media channels to convey two very different messages. This past summer I took a corporate finance course that was instructed by a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. He and I have not spoken since our three-week-long course but he told me to contact him after a few weeks of school this fall semester. Knowing that it would be inappropriate to call or text him, remembering that I made that mistake this past summer, I specifically chose to contact him through the rather lean e-mail medium. Also, the symbolism of this medium complemented the rather-professional message I sought to convey. Though he knew who I was, I still felt the need to be formal in our conversational episode. Additionally, the asynchronicity of e-mail enabled me to take my time in presenting myself favorably. Given the few nonverbal cues on which he could form a continued impression of me, he most likely over-attributed the degree to which I am polite and intelligent, and re-allocated cognitive resources to remember our interactions over the summer in support of his over-attributions. As the Impression Management Model states, I specifically chose the e-mail medium to maximize benefits, and minimize costs to a preferred impression, through the use of a mediated channel in positively and negatively valenced episodes.
Secondly, I recently chose a richer video-chat medium to contact my sister who is currently living in Paris. In sharing good news, I specifically chose a videoconference because I wanted a richer medium through which I could share my good news. Though I definitely did not choose this medium to bask in glory at the sight of my sister praising me, as O’Sullivan states in his Impression Management Model, I did enjoy seeing my sister’s reaction in a nearly face-to-face medium. This is inconsistent with O’Sullivan’s model, which states that channel preferences for the initiator will lean towards mediated channels in both positively and negatively valenced episodes.

Do our online impressions form as a result of who we say we are or what others interpret?

Ahoy all.

So this weekend I spend a good deal of time on IRC talking to various people seeking to answer an interesting question. When we are conversing with others on the internet, do their impressions form when we tell them who we are? Or are others sharper than that and able to detect whether we are masking our identity? For the purpose of this experiment, I decided not to change anything about the way I interact with others, because if I did act differently, then I would be lacking a good control to compare my results against. Instead, all I did was mention (casually) that I was male sometimes and female others. Other than that, I carried the conversation as I normally would speak to an absolute stranger that I had never met before. I generally carried out my conversations for about 20-25 minutes so we would have enough time to get to know each other while still giving myself a chance to speak with roughly 15 different people, nearly evenly splitting the number of times I said I was male and female. I first spoke to about 4 people telling them that I was a male so I would have something to compare my responses against. Then I spoke to about 4 as female, then 2 more as male so I could make new observations, and finally about 5 more as female. Also, I spoke to males only just to preserve the variables that were introduced.

My results were quite interesting. In some cases, I found that my answer didn't make much of a difference to the people that I was talking with. In the majority of cases when I said that I was male, there was nothing really extraordinary that I observed. Comparatively speaking, the other people were sometimes less interested unless we found some common ground to talk about like Linux or something like that. Other hot topics included mostly academic topics like careers, majors and other things of that nature. I tried dipping into sports a big, but didn't get very much a response at all.

On the other hand, when I mentioned that I was female, I had a small variety of responses. The majority of who I mentioned I was female to tried to hit on me. Their passes were varied in degree from slight to moderate, but for the most part, it wasn't too heavy. Most of the people I spoke to seemed to be the shy with their comments, making comments that were more sexually immature than sexually imposing. I considered it harmless, especially since I knew that they probably wouldn't have mentioned it if I didn't say I was female. But more significantly, and more generally, all the people I spoke to when I said I was female seemed to be more interested in talking. Even if they didn't make a noticeably flirtatious comment, they seemed to be testing the water, intrigued as to why a female would initiate a conversation with them, possibly hopeful for some future gratification or something of the nature. This is in contrast to the responses as I was male, when my responses were much more terse and succinct. Of course, there were a few that were either so subtle or not responsive at all that it didn't seem to make a difference as to what sex I introduced myself to them as. These few generally seemed more shy and introverted, and less likely to produce a response. Their responses were equally terse as the ones I received when I said I was male.

As to whether they could tell whether I was male or female, some seemed to lose interest in talking to me when I didn't respond to their innuendos. Nobody really questioned whether I really was female (or male for that matter, thankfully), but they did seem to think that I wasn't exactly a conventional female that regularly went around in the IRC realm. The fact of the matter is that when you act the same way whether it's as a male or female, I think that it can still be difficult for whoever you're talking to to be really sure which you are. Of course, if you make openly explicit comments that say whether you're male or female, (regardless of which you really are), then there will obviously be no doubt as to your identity. These are indicated by my results. When you simply state which sex you are, it seems that you more seem to change your partner's impression of you, but it is not very easy for them to tell unless you tell them. This strongly supports the hyperpersonality theory where the reactions are largely based on little information, and I gave them extremely little to work with. In the majority of my conversations, I talked of little more than my location and career. Their extreme responses are definitely caused by the fact that I said I was male or female and that I am in college (which was basically implied when I spoke of my school-related affairs).

Interesting results - I think in future attempts, I might want to divulge more about myself to see how much I have to say when my results start to diverge.

Until later.

ashish
(I don't like capitalizing my name)

Assignment #3: "Hey Friend! Wait up! I'm right behind you! Heyy!"

In class we discussed different types of media selection that we use everyday to communicate. Some were considered lean channels (less cues) and others were rich channels (ones with more cues). After learning about O’Sullivan’s Media Richness Theory, I started to pay attention to my choice of media selections when talking with friends.

One situation in which I had to pick a certain media type of communications was done just a couple of hours ago for me. I was on my way home from classes and just 10ft. in front of me was a friend. I decided, since there were no other people in between us, to shout out his name and catch up with him that way. I considered calling him on my cell phone, but thought I was close enough to shout to him and him being able to hear me. We walked down together for a little bit, then he had to go to class and I proceeded to walk home. I chose to have a FtF interaction, which is a rich channel according to O’Sullivan, because I thought it would be the quickest, most efficient way to communicate. I considered calling him, but I thought he might not hear his cell phone and at the same time, I felt he was close enough to just shout out to.

Just a couple feet later, I spotted another friend, this time, the pathway was a lot more crowded, several people in between us and he was also farther away. I did not think I could shout to him and stop him because he was too far away, so I decided to call him and ask him to wait for me. Now that I am reflecting on the latter situation, I realized that there were other factors that contributed to my decision to call the second friend rather than a simple FtF interaction of calling out his name like the first situation. One reason that contributed to using a leaner channel is the fact that there were several people between me and my friend. I thought the FtF choice would be ineffective because my voice would be lost in the crowd. Also, I did not want to embarrass myself by attempting to get the attention of my friend, and him potentially not hearing me. I did not want to present myself in the public as a “loser” who could not get the attention of a friend. I think everyone can agree with me when they try to call out a friend’s name passing by on campus, possibly across the street or quad, then feeling very embarrassed because the friend did not hear/notice you. Therefore, the safe choice for me was to take the leaner approach and call my friend for the sake of not risking embarrassment.

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Assignment #3: Different Approaches to Ambiguity

We are constantly making decisions about what medium to use to express ourselves. As technology rises, that range of choices has become increasingly overwhelming. It was not at all difficult to find instances of media selection this weekend. I chose two ambiguous interactions with contrasting valence, to see how they compared.

In my first interaction, I had to confront a student employee (we'll call him Jack) whom I supervise for neglecting follow through on an important project. I chose to use e-mail. I specifically wanted to avoid non-verbal cues, so that I could benefit from spelling out my concerns without being stymied by my own nerves in a face-to-face encounter. I don't like to have these sorts of accusatory discussions, but when they are called for they are crucial. The buffer eased tensions by avoiding a confrontational situation, which would have been unavoidable face-to-face. Not only did the asynchronous nature of e-mail give my message time to sink in, it also provided Jack an opportunity to respond on his own terms. Should he choose to call me because he prefers the richer medium, he has that option.

My choice in this case clearly supports O'Sullivan's assertions that we sometimes choose a leaner medium to manage self-presentation, even when the communication is equivocal in nature. Given the negative valence of accusation in this situation, combined with the locus of self, I easily preferred the mediated communication. Here I embraced the ambiguity not only to diffuse the situation for my own comfort, but also to permit Jack an opportunity to manage his own impressions by giving him space and allowing him to choose his own channel to respond. As we see in O'Sullivan's Impression Management Model, this back and forth does not exactly exhibit efficiency. Whatever the outcome, the focus here is on regulating self-presentation with ambiguity. This strays from the Media Richness Theory, which holds that we will explicitly choose a richer media for ambiguous tasks such as this.

My next interaction supports MRT. My brother recently graduated and started his new job. He landed a great position, though he works for Hospice (providing counseling for families with loved ones on the verge of passing away,) so it is very difficult, emotional work. I know that it is taking a toll on him and I wanted to let him know how proud I was. I chose the richest media that I could, considering that he lives far away in Colorado: the telephone was the channel. We had a great talk. By the time we hung up, I had an even greater respect for him and I believe that he felt better to have been able to talk about his crazy new life with his older brother.

MRT focuses on the multiplicity of cues in a richer medium, as well as the availability of feedback. A text message, an email, or even IM would have been a poor substitute for being able to hear my brother's voice and vice versa. We know each other so well that there are also plenty of non-verbal cues which are implied in a tone of voice. I was very happy with my decision to use richer media in this successful interaction. My goal was met.

And what of Jack, the wayward student whom I targeted via email? He emailed me back immediately, requesting a face-to-face meeting to talk about the situation. It was obviously in his best interest to choose the richest medium possible to plead his case. Hopefully, his choice wasn't an effort to optimize his efforts at deception! Perhaps after this week's lectures I'll be better equipped to assess that possibility.

3 A Weekend of Media Selection

Since individuals use various forms of media each day, it is sometimes difficult to stop and examine how our individual media selection varies based on social context, message content, convenience, and several other factors. Reflecting upon my weekend media usage, two specific instances are particularly interesting to relate to O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Model.

On Friday night I told two of my closest friends, Kathryn and Michelle, that I would let them know if I decided to go out in Collegetown (so that we could meet up). In the midst of getting ready and figuring out my plans, I completely forgot to call them and went out with some of my other friends. Towards the end of the night, I ran into Michelle on the street where she confronted me regarding the fact that I hadn’t called her. Although I tried to defend myself, I was caught off-guard and wasn’t really sure what to say in this face-to-face interaction. After we went our separate ways, I chose to send her a text message so that I could carefully select each word and get my message across clearly with greater control than I had in person. This supports O’Sullivan’s idea of interactional control, which focuses on the ability to control the timing and nature of information exchanged. In addition, this leaner channel served as a buffer, allowing me to apologize and admit that I was wrong, without being as “embarrassed” as I may have been in person.

Another instance in which I chose a communication medium for a particular purpose occurred on Saturday afternoon. Since one of my roommate’s birthdays is coming up, my other two roommates and I chipped in to buy her a present. I charged the gift to my credit card and therefore my other roommates owed me a portion of the money. Although I was sure I would get the money back, I didn’t want my friends to forget and wanted to be paid back as soon as possible. I chose to send the same IM to my roommates reminding them that they owed me money and to give me it whenever they got the chance. Even though I live down the hall from them, I chose to send an IM due to the symbolic meaning of the channel. O’Sullivan suggests that the symbolic meaning or the message conveyed by using a specific channel (rather than just the content of a message), may affect the channel one chooses to use. Instant messages are traditionally thought of as a casual way of speaking to one another and therefore seemed like an appropriate to send a casual reminder. If I would have taken that effort to go into each of their rooms and remind them about the money, it may have seemed like I was making a bigger deal out of it than I intended. Although I had the ability to speak to my friends face-to-face, I chose the leaner medium of IM in order to send my friends a symbolically casual reminder that they owed me money.

These media selection encounters I had this weekend support O’Sullivan’s theory, which suggests that in certain situations you may choose a rich or lean media based on the context of the message.

Comments:

http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/3-crazy-kids-and-their-newfangled.html

http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-3-managing-my-media-2.html

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.

Assignment 2: Nice guy or just too creepy??

After searching 15 minutes for a perfect chat room, I decided to enter the one titled “Pool players” As soon as I entered the chat room and looked at the statements some people were making, I knew I was going to encounter some weird people. However, I decided to give it a try and keep the hope alive that there are some nice people who could help me. I wanted to keep a conversation going with someone so I asked, “can anyone teach me how this online pool game works??” One person replied and their screen name was ‘HUNG’. A little scared I still decided to talk to this person who was a 19 year old male from the University of Miami.

The conversation remained pleasant the whole time with him explaining to me what to do and how to play the game online. Even when I tried to get on his nerves by saying, “dude, I don’t get that part…why can’t you do a better job at explaining that to me?”, he was nice and replied that he was sorry. This conversation lasted 20 minutes and by the end he was asking me what my AIM screen name was. Even though he seemed innocent, his niceness and his comment made me very uncomfortable and I decided to leave the chat room.

This CMC experience for me definitely supported the Hyperpersonal model. With the lack of cues, my impression of ‘Hung’ was more exaggerated and intense. Maybe this person was just being nice, but because I couldn’t hear his voice and couldn’t see any visual cues, I thought that he was creepy and a little too friendly. Furthermore, this conversation also negates the SIP theory by Walther (1993) since the information was related very quickly through this chat and I was able to develop a clear impression of this person. In addition to the SIP, the Cues Filtered Out theory did hold a little ground since it says that the lack of cues in CMC would lead to neutral, negative and undeveloped impressions. Even though my impression of ‘HUNG’ was not neutral, it was undeveloped and negative.

My conversation with ‘HUNG’ was kind of doomed from the start because of his screen name but even when he was nice, I had my reservations about him. Also, I thought it was a little odd that a 19 year old from the University of Miami was in a pool chat room. Well, I guess it’s not that odd since he was talking to a 20 year old senior from Cornell University.

3 My Media Selection

Saturday night I had an Office Season 3 marathon with my friend. To watch, however, I had to ask my suitemate to put his TV in the common room. My suitemates and I discussed the television/cable situation before, so, while my suitemate had already agreed to donate his TV to the common room, I didn’t want to seem cold, or give the impression that I was rushing him into giving it up. I wanted to come off sincere and genuine.

Since he lives next to me, and talking face-to-face, instant messaging, and using the phone all take the same amount of time, it came down to how complex I anticipated our discussion being. I wanted to explain that his TV was bigger than my friend’s, and thus, we wanted to watch in the suite.

Later, to let my friend know the plan, I instant messaged him to say that my suitemate agreed to let me move the TV. Since I was doing other work, I didn’t want to use face-to-face communication or the phone because these would undoubtedly have taken more time. Obligatory “Hey, how are you” greetings and discussing things other than plans for the night would have prevented me from getting all my work done. I wanted to say more than “Office, my place, 9:00,” however, so I chose not to text him. I found this middle ground in IM. I was allowed to send quick messages that we got permission to use the TV, and that once I got it set up and made sure my DVD player worked, I would give him a call. I was not drawn into a prolonged conversation - an advantage to IMing.

My observations of media choices this Saturday support the Media Richness Theory. When the conversation was going to be more equivocal and complex, such as explaining why I wanted to move the TV and asking permission, I chose the richest medium there is: face-to-face. When some simple facts about plans needed to be relayed I chose a less rich medium in instant messaging. Since the plans were not as simple as just time and place, however, I chose IM over the even less rich text messaging.

The communication I observed this weekend doesn’t apply to O’Sullivan’s model because neither asking for permission nor relaying time/place information fall under the categories of boost, praise, confess, or accuse. Thus, it was really only possible to assess my communication in relation to Media Richness, and my behavior supported this theory.