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.
1 comment:
Carlos, I have the same issues with my mom. I’ll be talking to her online about something and she’ll call me because it’s too complicated to explain through instant messaging. As for your communication experiences this week, I noticed that you mentioned valence but felt that Media Richness Theory related more to your situation. I think the reason is that explaining something to someone doesn’t fall under boost, praise, confess, or accuse. For this reason, it is tough to judge the interaction with your mom on the basis of O’Sullivan’s model. I came across the same issue when I realized that relaying simple time/place information doesn’t really fall into the categories either. Lastly, I think you make a nice distinction between email and text. While both are asynchronous, text only, quick media, the difference is that we seem to put more time into our emails. Thus, it made sense for you to choose a text message.
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