3: Confession To An Old Friend and the Pride of Winning

Last year, a friend of mine was about to finish his study abroad experience in America and fly back to his home country, Turkey, to finish his undergraduate degree. That May, as we were saying goodbye, I had made the promise that I would contact him throughout the summer to talk about what he was up to and about returning to school in Turkey the next year. As the summer passed, we were both caught up in internships or activities that neither of us actually took the time to call the other, perhaps as a product of procrastination. As the new school year rolled around, I had this terrible feeling in my gut that he would be disappointed that I hadn’t kept my promise and taken the time to contact him, and that once we did talk, the psychological distance between us would be very uncomfortable. I didn’t have the nerve to phone him, but I rather waited a few hours for him to show up on IM. When he came online, I felt compelled to confess my inability to keep my promise, so I sent him an instant message in a somewhat nonchalant, friendly tone at first, modifying my behavior in order to hide my deep-seated guilt. I didn’t get a response for a few minutes, which made me feel that maybe he was ignoring me or didn’t want to talk to me. Just then, I heard my cell phone buzzing, and at that instant, I had this queasy feeling in my stomach. I did not want to talk on the phone with this guy who was undoubtedly going to question me on why I hadn’t I hadn’t tried to contact him all summer. I knew I couldn’t hide my guilt on a medium as rich as the telephone – I would rather prefer to use a mediated interaction, such as IM, to confess my situation so that I could keep my composure more easily and more carefully select my words in order to appease him. This attitude agrees with O’Sullivan’s Model given the negative valence and a self locus that describes the confession situation and the preference of mediated interaction that goes along with the desire to confess. In those few seconds while the phone was ringing, I had started to come up with various explanations, and I even began to formulate counter-attacks by questioning why he hadn’t taken the effort to contact me. As it turned out, we ended up talking like the old friends we were, and he was not at all as angry as I had worried he would be. Although my fear of confessing on a medium as rich as the telephone indicated an adherence to O’Sullivan’s Model, my friend’s preferences had seemed to follow the Media Richness Theory in that he insisted on choosing a rich medium for the equivocal task of getting caught up with an old friend.

Another instance of media selection involves a group project that I and three other classmates had undertaken last year. We were competing in a semester-long business simulation competition for a management class and had to meet up at least twice every week. We had started out meeting in group study lounges at the library, but we had eventually gotten to the point where our decisions became a lot more objective, at which point we found that using IM, Skype, or email for group communication was preferred. This choice agrees with the Media Richness Theory in that as we got more familiar and more mechanical with the tasks we needed to accomplish, they became less equivocal, and therefore we preferred to communicate over the leaner media types. However, at the end of the semester, we ended up winning the competition, so the four of us went out to a restaurant to celebrate, and began to hang out with each other more often – communicating through unmediated interaction more so than when we were trying to accomplish our goal. What we wanted was praise from each other, being acknowledged for our hard work and accomplishments during the competition. O’Sullivan hypothesized that the negative valence and “other” locus associated with praise would lead to a low preference for mediated interaction – rather, a greater desire for F2F communication, which is exactly what our group had experienced after we had successfully accomplished our goal.

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