Media richness theory
[1] Leaning on information processing theory for its theoretical foundation, MRT was originally developed to describe and evaluate communication media within organizations.
This technology affords organizations the opportunity to have richer communication than via traditional conference calls which only provide audio cues to the participants involved.
Daft and Lengel also assert that not all executives or managers in organizations demonstrate the same skill in making effective media choices for communications.
In comparison, static messages like reading information on a company's website or browsing an electronic bulletin board can be defined as leaner media since they are not customized to the individual needs of job seekers; they are asynchronous in their feedback and, since they are primarily text-based, there are no opportunities for verbal inflections or body gestures.
In order to facilitate productive cooperation and team dynamics, organizations benefit from considering the technology tools that are provided for coworking and communication.
[21] The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which originally gained prominence in the 1960s, describes a company's self-regulation in the compliance of the ethical and moral standards.
In a study examining representations of the former Yugoslavia on the World Wide Web, Jackson and Purcell proposed that hypertext plays a role in determining the richness of individual websites.
[23] They developed a framework of criteria in which the use of hypertext on a website can be evaluated in terms of media richness characteristics as set forth by Daft and Lengel in their original theoretical literature.
[7] Senders that use less-rich communication media must consider the limitations of that medium in the dimensions of feedback, multiple cues, message tailoring, and emotions.
"[27] Though Generation Y users consider texting to be a rich medium, there is additional evidence that shows that easily accessible and non-intrusive media (i.e., texting, Twitter) were more likely to be used for sharing positive than negative events, and intrusive and rich media (i.e., phone calling) were more likely to be used for sharing negative than positive events.
[28] Additionally, in order to better understand teenagers' use of MSN (later called Microsoft Messenger service), Sheer examined the effect of both media richness and communication control.
E-mail is now thought of as a verbal tool, with its capacity to enable immediate feedback, leverage natural language, and embed emotion via acronyms and emoticons.
Software or Video Conferencing Systems (VCS) such as Skype and Google Hangouts allow for more visual cues than just audio conversations.
In another study, Koutamanis et al. (2013) suggest that adolescents’ engagement through instant messaging may actually serve to improve their respective abilities to enter into in-person relationships in the real world.
[42] And further suggest that face-to-face communication may negatively skew people's interactions if the participants’ first impressions are influenced by biases that are responsive to visual cues.
According to Buller and Burgoon, "deception occurs when communicators control the information contained in their messages to convey a meaning that departs from the truth as they know it."
[46] Further research by Lan and Sie (2010), that within the category of text based communication channels, there are significant differences that should shape an instructor's choice of technology.
One of the key characteristics of e-learning is its capability to integrate different media, such as text, picture, audio, animation and video to create multimedia instructional material.
[55] Through the creation of new social networks and various online platforms, media allows for many more opportunities of "greater visibility and community building potential of cultural citizenship's previous 'ephemeral' practices.
"[56] The explosion of creativity on the internet can be linked to formal institutions such as government and education in order to allow for a broader participation base, leading to stronger engagement of citizens and gaining access to a wider range of insight and knowledge.
Men are found to be able to make quicker decisions while women facilitate conversations deeply in order to fully understand what is being talked about.
Markus argues that social pressures can influence media use much more strongly than richness, and in ways that are inconsistent with MRT's key tenets.
[64] Additionally, Dennis, Kinney, and Hung found that in terms of the actual performance of equivocal tasks, the richness of a medium has the most notable effect on teams composed entirely of females.
On the other hand, "matching richness to task equivocality did not improve decision quality, time, consensus, or communication satisfaction for all-male or mixed-gender teams.
Blau, Weiser, and Eshet-Alkalai study the differences and similarities of perceived and actual outcomes for students who take the same class either online or in traditional classroom settings.
Further, they also suggest that a “high level of medium naturalness might hinder the understanding of a very complicated type of knowledge”,[2] which is the opposite of what the media richness theory predicts.
Media with high degrees of synchronicity, such as face-to-face meetings, offer participants the opportunity to communicate in real time, immediately observe the reactions and responses of others, and easily determine whether co-participants are fully engaged in the conversation.
For tasks that require convergence, media with high degrees of synchronicity, such as face-to-face meetings and video conferences, offer participants the opportunity to communicate at the same time, and develop interpersonal reactions to reach an agreement through discussion.
[85] For example, a study by Kahai, Carroll, and Jestice (2007) showed that participants' familiarity with instant messaging led them to perceive the medium as richer than the virtual world known as Second Life.
Participants' lack of experience with the objectively richer virtual world may have affected their perception when compared to the more familiar medium of instant messaging.
