My weekend was filled with opportunities to use many different mediums to communicate to friends and family. First, a little story to explain the title of this blog, before I begin talking about equivocal tasks and rich mediums and interesting stuff like that. Everything that could have gone wrong this weekend…WENT WRONG. On Saturday night my car broke down ($725 dollars later, it will be fixed sometime this week). Also on Saturday night, I walked in the rain a little too long and got a cold. And on Sunday morning, my cell phone decided not to work. Life without my cell phone (a.k.a. the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins) is killing me. It is my number one way of communicating with the world!
Anyways, lack of cell phone made me use other mediums to communicate with the outside world. I had to stay in contact with my mom all Sunday and today, because the auto shop working on my car was going to call her with the diagnosis. I did the opposite of the media richness theory, for I used email (a leaner media) to communicate with my mom about my car (a more equivocal task). However, If my cell phone was working, I would have used the richer medium by calling her. It felt very impersonal and dry using email for such a situation. A simple phone call could have updated me on the status of my vehicle. Instead, I spent most of my day bumming computers off of my friends to check my email. No fun.
Before my ordeal started on Saturday night, I do recall sending one text message before my piece-of-junk phone decided to go into a coma. It was to my friend Vanessa, telling her to meet me at my friend’s house. Not an equivocal task (asking to meet somewhere), I sent a simple text message (lean medium). That way, if she didn’t feel like showing, rejection wouldn’t be so harsh on me or my friend. This instance of communication matches up with the media richness theory, because the unequivocal task of making plans does not require rich media.
All said and done...I just miss my phone.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hey Ashley, great post. This may sound mean, haha, but it was entertaining to hear about your sad weekend. I appreciate the touch of humor in your post; it makes reading and commenting on posts a lot more enjoyable. I was a little confused about one aspect of your blog though. You wrote how you were forced into only communicating with your mother via e-mail because of your broken phone. You then wrote you even had to bum computers off of your friends to email your mom. Why didn’t you just “bum” a cell phone off your friends to talk to your mom through a richer medium?—Just a suggestion. I hope everything works out with your car and you learn that it is ok to borrow people’s phones too.
Ashley,
I think your two examples exemplify the O'Sullivan model perfectly. In the car case, you should have been using a phone or FTF but couldn't, and clearly the situation would have been a bit better. And in Vanessa's case, you used a text as opposed to asking her FTF to go with you which as you pointed out would have put a lot more pressure on her.
I think even though we have so many ways of communicating with each other now over say, 1960, we are still tied in certain situations to one medium or another...because things like doing interviews over the phone or asking someone out on a date over IM are not exactly ideal situations and the outcomes can be much better if done in person.
Great post!
Post a Comment