One of my good friends at Cornell is taking this semester off and I can only speak with her when she calls me. Unfortunately, my parents' telephone number and the number that my friend calls me from are both restricted. So I told my friend that I am usually available around 6pm and to try to call me around that time.
This past Saturday was extremely hectic for me. I had to do a lot of homework, run some errands, and attend a formal which started at 7pm. I was extremely busy so I didn’t really have time to talk on my cell phone. When I received a missed phone call from a private number, I automatically assumed it was my parents calling because I haven’t heard from my friend in a week or so. When I initially looked at the missed call I didn’t feel the need to call my parents back right away because if it was urgent, they would have left a message. Later that evening, I looked at my phone again and saw that I missed another call from “private” but this time there was a voicemail. It was my friend and she left an upsetting message telling me that she isn’t going to call me again because she thought I was ignoring her calls. I was extremely hurt by the message and felt the need to contact her as quickly as possible to explain myself. Since I was unable to see her face-to-face, I decided to use the telephone so that she could hear how truly sorry I was for missing her calls. The phone call was an example of using a rich medium for a less equivocal task. I wanted to use language variety and make my message more personal so that she would see how truly sorry I was. This medium served best in this situation because I was able to provide immediate feedback to defend myself.
Earlier in the week I promised one of my friends that I would attend happy hour with her on Wednesday. However, when Wednesday came around, I wasn’t in the mood to drink and I wanted to go to the gym instead. When she text messaged me expressing how excited she was for happy hour, I felt badly telling her that I didn’t want to go. I decided to text message her after I thought of a good excuse of why I couldn’t go. I used this specific communication channel because I thought it would allow me more time to think about exactly what I wanted to say so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings. It also seemed a lot easier to lie through text messaging than it would have been if I had called her. I found that this situation supported O’Sullivan’s theory because I was seeking to increase equivocality by selecting a leaner channel. By using a lean medium (ex. text messaging), I had more time to plan my response, I had control over the message generation and transmission, and I felt that it decreased the chances of my deceptiveness being detected.
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2 comments:
Hi Robin. For your first situation, I agree that it was more efficient for you to use a rich media (phone) to apologize to her friend. The multiplicity of cues, such as tone of voice would help your friend realize that not answering her calls was not on purpose. Also the availability of feedback from your friend would let you know if she actually accepted your explanation. Thus matching this equivocal task with a rich media definatly supports the Media Richness Theory.
I also agree with you that your second situation falls in line with O'Sullivan's model. The locus was the self and the valence was negative (lie). Thus, as O'Sullivan states you would use a lean media to create a buffer zone and have more control over the situation; which is what you did.
Hi Robin. I quite like your post because I think it explains well your thought processes and justifies your support for the theories you thought fit with your experiences. I agree that it was more efficient for you to choose a richer medium in the first example, for a task that seemed fairly equivocal for you, so that you would be able to give and get as many cues as possible, which does in fact fit in with the Media Richness Theory. You also said that with you second experience with media selection, that you chose a text as a social "buffer" to call off your Happy Hour date because of a negative valence and locus of other, which fits well into the O'Sullivan theory. Another way that you could look at these experiences, though, is that with the first example, you wanted to tell your friend how much you enjoy talking to her and that you don't ignore her calls but that you in fact love getting calls from her, so in a way this communication has a positive valence and locus of other, so you would then be praising your friend and would be less likely to choose a mediated form of communication, so it fits in with the O'Sullivan model as well. Similarly, with your second example, you chose to text your friend to cancel your date, so you would have a "buffer." However, you could also say that the message here is pretty straightforward and unequivocal: you want to cancel a meeting, there's not much more to it than that, so there would be no reason to call her up and go into great detail about it when the message is pretty simple to begin with, so it could therefore fit in with the Media Richness Theory too. I'm not at all saying that I think you assessed your situations poorly, on the contrary I think you gave great support and I fully understand your arguments, I just find it interesting how many ways we have of reflecting on these situations and our motivations, and how both of these theories can prove themselves useful in the same situations, even though they may initially seem to contradict one another.
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