Assignment 3: Excuses, excuses

For blog assignment 3 I am writing about choice two. The first example of media selection is text messaging and the second one is e-mail.

It was around eight o’clock on Friday night when my roommate and I were discussing our plans for the evening. Being that we both had practice Saturday morning, and it was extremely hot in our room, we decided to relax in an air-conditioned movie theater. We weren’t sure what our other friends were up to so I sent a mass text to five girls saying “Hey, Hairspray at Regal at 9:10, wanna go?” I chose this method of text messaging for a couple of reasons. First, I wasn’t physically with my friends so I couldn’t talk to them face to face. Texting was the fastest way for me to get in contact with the five girls because I could send the same message to all of them at the same time. The message that I was trying to communicate would have come across the same way if I had been talking to them face-to-face, on the phone, or online.

The second instance of media selection I thought of was sending an e-mail to my coach about having to miss practice on Monday. While e-mail is probably the most convenient form of communication, I just as easily could have called her. I chose e-mail, however, because I felt more comfortable giving my excuse through text, in an asynchronous format. On the phone, I would have to deal with her immediate response, as well as the tone of her voice.

In America today, efficiency is an essential component to successfully completing everyday tasks and activities. In the first instance of media selection I chose text messages for that very reason. This fits with the Media Richness Theory in that I chose a lean media for communication because my message was unequivocal. In the second instance I was agreeing more with O’Sullivan’s model because I was “confessing” to my coach that I would not be at practice. As the data suggests, a negative locus and negative valence increases the number of preferred mediated communication.