Assignment 3

For assignment 3 I am choosing to analyze two instances of media selection I made this past weekend. One of them deals with the selection of email to communicate, and the other selection was the telephone.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me for help in a personal extra-curricular project he will be working on for the next couple of months. I was hesitant to give him assurance that I would be much help because I am extremely busy with my school work, membership to Cornell organizations, and preparing to take the LSAT this semester. He promised that he would not take up a lot of my time and would really appreciate me helping him, so I finally agreed. His project has been moving along and I have been able to give him my advice as often as he asks for it, however I feel as though I am being asked to do more than I bargained for. My friend has been calling me frequently and IMing me every time I sign online to ask me more questions and give him more advice. This weekend when I was studying in the library he sent me an instant message saying that he really needed to talk to me and asked why I haven’t been returning his calls. I chose to respond to this message by selecting the media choice of email.
I chose email because I was a bit worried that my friend was upset with me and I did not feel like dealing with being reprimanded or being made to feel guilty in person or on the phone by not keeping my promise to help him out. My media selection supports O’Sullivan’s third hypothesis of impression management that when a person’s own locus of self presentation is being threatened, that person will prefer a mediated form of communication more than any other form. My friend was getting a bad impression of me and I had to explain why I hadn’t been more of a help to him in a way that I could control.
Another media selection I made this weekend was calling my parents to tell them about my first graded speech assignment for COMM201. After successfully completing a “How To” speech and getting extremely positive feedback from my classmates and professors, I wanted to let my parents know how well I did because they had given me the idea for my speech topic. This interaction also supports O’Sullivan’s findings on locus, valence, and self-presentational conditions. The locus of this interaction was self-presentational and it had a positive valence. I chose to call my parents to share my good news with them because this was the most personal means of communicating with them I had. I would have liked to talk to them face to face but this was impossible seeing as I am at school and they are home in NJ.
Overall, both media selections I made this weekend support O’Sullivan’s impression management hypothesis.