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.
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You have good applications of the O’Sullivan Model and Media Richness Theory. It’s always difficult for me to decide which situation represents which model. The more I look at examples, the more I see how both models can be applied. If I were the landlord, I wouldn’t want to let you know over the phone that I had given up the house after assuring you that you had a good chance because then I would hear the disappointment in your voice(s) and feel guilty about letting you down. I guess you could also argue that it would be inefficient to talk over the phone since I would have to be prepared to react to you and come up with excuses as to why I had to give up the house.
If you look at the second scenario from a different viewpoint, you could also say that the fight was an example of the O’Sullivan Model because the argument involved the self locus and negative valence so you used instant messaging as a buffer, but I think it’s more efficient to talk over AIM because it forced both of you to read each other’s arguments so you probably resolved the altercation faster than if you were ftf.
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