Ryan Rayer: Media Richness and A Nation of Strangers

Over the past 3 weeks, we have discussed many interesting concepts that have each caught my attention differently. One theory that I found to be thought provoking was the Media Richness Theory. The Study that got me thinking the most was Katz and Aspden’s “A Nation of Strangers” study on internet based communication vs. face to face communication.

               Media Richness Theory focuses on the amount of cues that each media has or does not have. It presents two different categories of Media: Rich Media and Lean Media. Media is considered rich if you can personalize language, if you can have immediate feedback, and if it has multiple cues. Media Richness Theory was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, I never put different forms of media in categories before. For example, I have been looking at technology in this course in the light of “CMC vs. FTF” without pitting the different forms of media against each other. For a couple of days after the media richness lecture, I was paying attention to the different forms of media I was using and if they were rich or lean media. In this process, I realized that I use much more lean media than rich. I text people a lot more often that I call them, I seldom use things like facetime or Skype, and I don’t believe I am often burdened with tasks that require rich media. I don’t believe my findings are very different than many people my age. Specifically in this class, I remember in the first week of lab we discovered that we overwhelmingly prefer face to face communication than CMC. I believe this fact in directly related to our media choices. For example: if we need to tell somebody something, we would rather tell them face to face instead of using Facetime. Overall, I believe the media richness theory is an interesting way of showing us which type of communication we prefer.

               Katz and Aspden’s “A Nation of Strangers” study took the pessimistic hysterical view of “people are going to become isolated because of the internet”. The two groups in the study were people who used the internet and people who did not. The findings in the study were that internet users were just as involved, if not more involved as other groups. Internet users had increased communication with friends and family, and users made new friends. The conclusion of the study was vague in the way that it stated that the Internet is going to be good and bad like any other new technology. While the study was interesting in its own right, one thing in particular about the study was interesting to me: the year it was conducted. This study was conducted in 1997. Besides the fact that I was only four years old, the internet as we know it now was extremely new. Personally, I believe a lot has changed since the study was done.  For example, they made have concluded that people made new friends online, but we now know that friendships made online are not really always real friendships. Also, they concluded that there was increased communication with friends and family. We also now know that this communication is often very passive. We communicate with distant family members online by posting “happy b day” on their wall once a year. I think most people would agree that this isn’t the best communication. Although the information collected may have been premature, they were definitely right in saying that the internet was going to be both good and bad.