The AcademiblogCMC::We're all Egoists, but that's okay!
Posted: Mon May 15, 04:42 PM
Phew, final season sure is a killer. But, things are settling down, back to posting!
Recently, floating around on slashdot and all over have been articles about CMC! Wow. Who would’ve thunk!
So, on the Christian Science Monitor
there’s an article about how people have trouble about communicating over email.
On of the main things that they cite, over and over again, comes from Media Richness Theory, which essentially says “Well, different types of media have different levels of “richness”, which covers the amount of information that can be conveyed. Face to face has probably the most, with all sorts of nonverbal cues along with verbal ones. Telephone would have less (and when it first came, there was all sorts of noise about how phones were so poor in cues that it’s destroying communication) And now we have computers and email.
In addition, the article added some stuff about how email has extra time pressure since it sends/recieves almost instantly so we’d want to fire a reply back without thinking about it.
But the biggest reason, was apparently egotism. I actually read one of the published articles on this some time ago, and can’t find my copy to cite right now, but they referred to a clever experiment/argument to show the phenonenon isn’t new.
Take your friend and sit them at a table across from you. Now, think of some song, and using your finger, tap out the melody or beat, whatever. Now, ask your friend whether they can identify the song? Well, previous studies have found that most “senders” will hear the song in their head, (paraphrasing from memory) “in full orchestrated glory” while the “reciever” has usually no clue what the heck is being transmitted.
What makes it interseting is that the sender has strong belief that the reciever got the message, because they heard it so clearly in their head, it seems impossible for the message to be misinterpreted. Hence: egotism in communication.
Maybe we just need more time to develop proper norms for handling email and CMC? I mean, eventually people got used to using letters, then eventually telephones. Well, given enough time, we’d probably get used to using email.
Time seems rather important anyways. Think about it, one of the reasons they say why email is easily misunderstood is because of time, there’s alot of rush to reply, etc. Well, if we come from an information theory perspective, information is information is information, visual, verbal, nonverbal, it’s all information. Looking at it from this angle. the media richness problem then seems more like a bandwidth issue. It’s not that we can’t pass the same sentiments as nonverbal cues, it just takes alot more time and effort to convey it.
So, moral of the story? Stop and take a breath. Think about how horribly busy you are, everyone else is probably just as busy as you are, so they’re not holding their breath waiting for a response from you.