On Friday night, my suitemates and I decided to order in food, and we wanted to find out if our friend who lived off campus wanted to come over and order with us. I decided to send him a text message to see if he wanted to eat with us. Within a minute, he responded, saying that he was interested and asking what time he should come over.
In this case, I mainly chose text messaging out of convenience. I also knew that my friend generally responded promptly to text messages, so I would likely receive a quick answer. Because of this, I felt that my choice did not have much in common with O’Sullivan’s theory of impression management. He says that for conversations in which the valence is negative and the locus is oneself, one would prefer mediated communication. In my case, the locus of the conversation was my friend (because I was asking him a question) and the valence was positive (because it was about a friendly, social gathering). Yet I still decided to use a mediated form of interaction to complete the task. Thus, I feel that my decision was more in sync with the Media Richness Theory, because it was a straightforward, unequivocal task that I elected to conduct in a lean medium.
The next day, I wanted to find out how my mother, who had recently fractured her kneecap, was doing. I decided to carry out this particular conversation over the phone.
I chose to talk to her over the phone because I felt that a more mediated form of interaction would seem more impersonal and make me sound less sincere. In this case, my decision matched up with O’Sullivan’s theory. The locus of the interaction was my mother, the valence was positive, and, indeed, I preferred to use a more robust form of communication. By making sure that my sympathy was highly visible, I was trying to manage my self-presentation in a way that my mother would better appreciate my good wishes. This conflicts with the Media Richness Theory. The task was fairly straightforward – I just wanted to find out how she was doing. The MRT may have predicted that because of this, I would have opted to use a leaner channel; this was clearly not the case.
Comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/blog-3-media-selectionmom-dadi-need.html
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-3-life-choices-of-media.html
2 comments:
Evan,
I agree with both of your media selection choices. Texting can be so convenient when you want to find out what someone is up to/their preference on an issue. You mentioned that you knew your friend "generally responded promptly to text messages." I think this is an important factor when deciding whether or not to engage in this kind of activity. While texting can be asynchronous, it is often more desirable to text synchronously. If your friend had not responded within an hour, for example, it would have defeated the purpose.
Hi Evan,
I thought your post was well thought out and analyzed. Contacting a friend through mediated interaction to invite him over for food is certainly the kind of unequivocal task that Daft and Lengel hypothesize in their Media Richness Theory. It is interesting how one can respond so quickly to such an objective invitation, and that such a short, unequivocal note could create what seemed like excitement on his part, due to his quick response time and positive reply. In your second example, where you were calling your mother to check up on her, you said that this was a fairly straightforward task that the MRT therefore predicts the use of a lean medium. This is a good analysis, however, I think that conversing with your ailing mother, consoling her for her situation and sympathizing with her inability to go about her daily routine, is a much more equivocal task than, say, communicating a meeting time. Although I can see how you formulated your argument against MRT in this case, I would have to suggest that perhaps the task was more on the side of equivocality, in that you had to, in some sense, make sure you were coming off the right way to her in order to keep your mother from feeling bad about her situation. Anyway, it was an enjoyable post and a good example about how there can be two sides to an issue.
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