Media naturalness theory
The theory has been applied to human communication outcomes in various contexts, such as: education,[1] knowledge transfer,[2] communication in virtual environments,[3] e-negotiation,[4] business process improvement,[5] trust and leadership in virtual teamwork,[6] online learning,[7][8] maintenance of distributed relationships,[9] performance in experimental tasks using various media,[10][11] and modular production.
[13][15] Kock points out that computer-mediated communication is far too recent a phenomenon to have had the time necessary to shape human cognition and language capabilities via natural selection.
[13] The face-to-face medium is presented as the medium enabling the highest possible level of communication naturalness, which is characterized by the following five key elements:[13][15] (1) a high degree of co-location, which would allow the individuals engaged in a communication interaction to see and hear each other; (2) a high degree of synchronicity, which would allow the individuals to quickly exchange communicative stimuli; (3) the ability to convey and observe facial expressions; (4) the ability to convey and observe body language; and (5) the ability to convey and listen to speech.
As such, those media are predicted to be associated with higher cognitive effort; in this case due primarily to a phenomenon known as information overload, which is characterized by individuals having more communicative stimuli to process than they are able to.
Very few phenotypic traits are innate (e.g., blood type); the vast majority, including most of those in connection with our biological communication apparatus, need interaction with the environment to be fully and properly developed.
[13] However, that adaptive design also significantly increased our ancestors' chances of choking on ingested food and liquids, and suffering from aerodigestive tract diseases such as gastroesophageal reflux.
Increases in cognitive effort and communication ambiguity are usually accompanied by an interesting behavioral phenomenon, called compensatory adaptation.
That is, communication fluency is believed to go down as a result of individuals making an effort to adapt their behavior in a compensatory way.
The electronic medium also reduced actual fluency by approximately 80%, and the quality of the task outcomes was not affected, suggesting compensatory adaptation.
The authors explain that the media compensation theory has been developed to specifically address two paradoxes: The authors grapple with how humans "who have not changed much in many millennia" (Hantula et al., 2011, p. 358) are able to successfully embrace and employ lean media, such as texting, considering their assumption that human evolution has progressed down a path toward, and adeptness for, face-to-face communication.
[18] The authors suggest that the study’s findings support Carlson and Zmud’s channel expansion theory (1999),[19] which asserts that humans are capable of adapting to new communication media (Kock & Garza, 2011).
[20] DeClerk and Holtzman also suggest that text messaging may be more focused than face-to-face communication because it is not cluttered by additional verbal and non-verbal cues that can otherwise tie up “cognitive resources” (2018, p.
[20] Additionally, Lisiecka, Rychwalska, Samson, Lucznik, Ziembowicz, Schostek, and Nowak (2016) point out that, although it has been generally accepted that “media other than face-to-face are considered an obstacle rather than an equally effective means of information transfer” (2016, p. 13), the results their study suggest that computer-mediated communication “has become similarly natural and intuitive as face-to-face contacts” (2016, p.
