This past weekend i had many opportunities to exercise media selection. The first example of media selection was when I recieved some bad news from home. My English bulldog Petey has been a big part of my family for nine years and he passed away this weekend. I was feeling really down so I called my best friend Josh. In this case I selected the richest medium possible other than a face to face meeting. Petey was everything to me and because of the personal nature of the situation I would think CMC to be inappropriate as well as ineffective in conveying how I felt. O'Sullivan's theory doesn't seem to be able to accurately account for very personal matters. The four routes of communication in the theory are intended to either boost, confess, praise, or accuse. Though I am the locus in this situation, and the valence is negative as it is bad news, I am not confessing anything. The theory says that a buffer should be created if valence is negative, but in this situation a buffer is the last thing I would want. O' Sullivan's theory focuses on impression management and doesn't take into account more personal situations in which impressions are disregarded.
My second example of media selection is less specific. I noticed that depending on the person I was contacting over this weekend there would only be one type of media used, and in most cases it was a phone call. The media richness theory focuses on choosing more or less complicated media depending on the complication of the task. While O'Sullivan's theory was very rooted in efficiency in CMC communication the media richness theory doesn't specifically mention efficiency. It does in fact emphasize efficiency however, because it says that a less equivocal task will obviously need less richness to be completed. I noticed this weekend that efficiency really has no bearing on the type of media that I choose to communicate with. I have found that with even the most unequivocal tasks I still use the richest medium.
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Eric, your blog was very interesting because you were able to examine personal media selections, thus displaying first-hand observations. I believe that your situation does in fact fall under O’Sullivan’s theory. You had information that you chose to confess to someone else. People have a skewed misconception that all confessions are negative, but a confession is just very personal information you are choosing to disclose to another. Since the valence isn’t necessarily negative, a buffer isn’t the best solution. I think the problem with O’Sullivan’s theory is that it looks at situations in black and white, not allowing for any grey area. Therefore, situations are looked at as being positive or negative, not neutral or some other place in between. In reference to your second media choice, here at school we do have an unavoidable buffer of not physically being able to communicate with someone face to face. I’m sure that given the option, one would appropriately choose to meet with people in person for certain situations.
Eric, my condolences go out to you and your family over the passing of your dog, Petey.
With regards to the medium that you chose to use with your best friend Josh, a phone call, I believe that you chose this particular medium because, like you said, you did not think it would be appropriate to effectively communicate your feelings over a CMC environment. Thus, according to the Media Richness Theory (MRT), you chose the optimal match between the equivocality of the task and the richness of the medium; in this case, since the task was highly equivocal, you chose a rich channel of communication, a phone call.
Regarding your second example, I found your comment to be quite intriguing because of your view that efficiency might not even play any role, let alone a small one, in deciding which medium we use to communicate a task. However, according to O’Sullivan and like Dana has pointed out above, I, too, believe that we prefer mediated interactions and create buffers, whether unconsciously or consciously, especially when the locus is expected to be ourselves, to communicate negative tasks.
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