Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
Summary by Scott Klemmer
Face-to-face communication has long been considered the holy grail
of communication, spawning a mini-industry of psychological study that measures
the "information richness" of various media judged against the
baseline of face-to-face communication. Information richness is a term first
introduced in Daft and Lengel's 1984 book chapter, "Information Richness:
A new approach to managerial behavior and organizational design." Their
chapter outlines, from a strategic management perspective, how communication
media vary, and how one must choose the proper media for the task. The key
metrics that Daft and Lengel use to discuss media are "(1) feedback
capability, (2) communication channels utilized, (3) source, and (4)
language." They assert that "Face-to-face is the richest form of
information processing because it provides immediate feedback. With feedback,
understanding can be checked and interpretations corrected. The face-to-face
medium also allows the simultaneous observation of multiple cues, including
body language, facial expression, and tone of voice, which convey information
beyond the spoken message." Daft and Lengel then map business
communication tasks to their "appropriate place" on the richness
scale. For example, "Media high in richness are used by top managers to
cope with equivocal information processing tasks. Media low in richness are
appropriate for the technical core." While the prescriptions the authors
offer are a bit awkward and probably out of date, their taxonomy of
communication has had lasting impact.
Hollan and Stornetta effectively argue that the pursuit of
face-to-face is a) often inappropriate, and b) destined to fail. The premise
behind this assumption is that a media attempting to imitate face-to-face fails
when communities only use that media when f-to-f is not available. When this
happens, electronic communication is at a disadvantage relative to f-to-f. They
argue that "In telecommunications research perhaps we have been building
crutches rather than shoes;" we only use the crutch when our fully
functional leg is not available. The authors suggest that researchers should
instead begin building shoes, which augment our legs, and we use them even when
they are fully functional. They astutely argue that there are potential
advantages to electronic communication that are not present in f-to-f.
"For example, three significant features of the new medium are its ability
to support asynchronous communication, anonymous communication, and to
automatically archive communication."
This theme of electronic tools as augmentations of human
capability is a central theme in non-CMC tool design. This goal of tool design
was first popularly voiced in Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man." And as early as the 1960's, tool builders such as
Douglas Engelbart described their research agenda as "augmenting the human
intellect." It's surprising therefore, that it wasn't until 1992 that the
research community started thinking about CMC tools as extensions rather than
substitutions.
The example systems outlined by Hollan and Stornetta have proved
effective as a research direction. Their "ephemeral communication"
system is much like many contemporary newsgroup systems. And their
"meeting others" system is very similar to the goal of many people's
web home pages.
However, I would assert that none of the systems Hollan and
Stornetta outline are shoes; I would consider them "virtual feet." By
this I mean that the goal of their work is not to augment f-to-f but to offer
CMC alternatives compelling enough that people choose them even when f-to-f is
available. (Much like many people choose to play video game sports even when
real sports are available.)
Several recent research projects have begun to address the issue
of actually building shoes. To pick a successful example, the Classroom 2000
work at Georgia Tech offers each of the three advantages outlined above in the
context of a real classroom. Among other things, the class is captured for
later reviewing and students can take notes on electronic tablets that are
integrated with the instructors slides.
Crutches have their role, as do virtual shoes, and I would assert
that building real shoes is a third important area for CMC systems.
References
Daft, R.L. and Lengel, R.H. Organizational Information
requirements, media richness, and structural design. Management Science, 32,
554-571, 1991.
McLuhan,
Marshall. Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man. MIT Press
Engelbart,
Douglas. AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework. 1962.