Media Richness Theory

Overview

Media richness theory (MRT) is a theoretical framework, originating in the study of organizations and management, for the discussion of how effective a communication medium is in conveying information. Richness considers not simply the content of a communication but how naturally and fluently users can communicate through a medium, its capacity for feedback and the conveyance of social cues and personality, and the role of uncertainty. The theory was originally intended to help organizations decide the best medium for any specific work-related communication. Work on media richness began in the 1960s, and theorists have either challenged or adapted its findings as new media have changed the norms of business and organizational communication.

Media richness theory (MRT) is a theoretical framework of communication, in which media are evaluated in terms of their “richness,” or the degree to which information is communicated without loss or misinterpretation. A typical diagram may list, from least to most rich, bulk written communications (i.e., advertising, junk mail, posters), personal written communications (letters, email, texting), telephone calls, video calls, and face-to-face communication. Having originated in studies of organizations and management, MRT is typically focused only on media of communication, not entertainment and news media like television, movies, or music. MRT is associated with work explaining how and why people make the decisions they do about communications media, more often than it is with making recommendations or other normative judgments about those media. Some of the types of information considered when evaluating a medium’s richness include feedback, social cues, tone, focus, personality, emphasis. Another consideration is the degree to which the medium allows natural uses of language; before texting and online chatting became common, for instance, most people were more stilted in written communication and less adept at drawing attention to the most important parts of what they wanted to convey while avoiding ambiguity. Media that are not rich, or less rich than a medium to which they are being compared, are sometimes called lean media.

A simple example of what theorists mean by richness is email or texting compared to a phone call. Email lacks the tone of voice, prosody, and other audible paralanguage of a phone call, which often leads to misunderstandings. As email and other computer-mediated communication became more popular, users made up for this richness gap through textual methodologies for adding emphasis (such as the use of *asterisks*, ‗underscores‗, or selective CAPitalization) and emoticons, and more recently, emoji, memes, and reaction GIFs. Phone calls, in turn, are less rich than video communication, which is less rich than an in-person conversation. It is worth noting that discussions about media richness are often predicated on the unconsciously ableist assumption that adding a sensory modality adds richness: a phone call is not a richer medium for a deaf person, for instance, and privileging ostensibly richer media may disadvantage some parties.

The email/telephone example highlights an important dimension of the media richness discussion: not all of the information in a communication is conveyed consciously and intentionally. For instance, there are occasions when we may purposefully choose a less rich medium for communication in order to limit the amount of information we convey accidentally. An email or text instead of a phone call avoids background noise and allows us to compose a message that conveys a tone that might be at odds with our tone on a phone call. In particular, we can limit information about our emotional state, which means it is easier to compose a professional, formal email when we are emotionally agitated than it is to conduct a formal and impersonal phone call. Sometimes this intentional reduction of richness is for the sake of formality; sometimes it may be to aid deception; sometimes it is to give us time to collect our thoughts and communicate asynchronously, without being interrupted or losing our train of thought.

Richness is not the only criterion for evaluating a communication medium, nor does MRT claim this. Attention and feedback, for instance, are important factors. In synchronous communication, especially face-to-face communication, voice calls, or video calls, each speaker receives ongoing feedback, both intended and unconscious, from immediate responses to changes in expression or other paralinguistic cues.

The increased reliance on email in workplaces led to the development of channel expansion theory (CET), an adjunct to MRT, by John Carlson and Robert W. Zmud in their 1999 paper “Channel Expansion Theory and the Experiential Nature of Media Richness Perceptions.” Just as MRT in general reflects the contention of contingency theory that there is no “one size fits all” solution to running an organization, CET is a framework acknowledging that the richness of a medium varies with the experience of an individual, rather than being equally rich for everyone. The basic form of the theory says that user perceptions and prior experiences of a communication medium contribute to the construction of continued experiences of that medium.

Carlson and Zmud focused on four kinds of experiences that impact the user’s perception of the medium’s richness: experience with the channel (the medium), experience with the topic, experience with the organizational context in which the communication is transpiring, and experience with the person or persons with whom one is communicating. Much of this would seem to accord to anecdotal experience: most people agree, for instance, that they communicate better with coworkers they have had a long and healthy working relationship with. The channel and context experiences reflect the theory’s origins in explaining email’s place in MRT. In 1999, email was a technology that was roughly twenty-five years old, but only recent graduates had used it in school, and adoption for either personal or professional use varied widely. These disparate histories with email led to disparate feelings about its use at work, as well as disparate fluency in communicating effectively with it. But critics of CET argue that its framework is less useful outside of that specific context—that it has less to offer in the twenty-first century, when email has long since ceased to be a novelty, and may not do a good job of describing the use of other new media.

Further Insights

The main questions MRT originally sought to answer revolved around guiding communications choices within a business or organization, especially detailing the reasons for those choices rather than issuing blanket recommendations that did not take into account differences in organizational strategies and scope. With MRT, businesses can decide on the best medium for communications about specific kinds of decisions: for day-to-day progress reports or information requests; for communicating with the public or regulatory agencies; for addressing shareholders or other stakeholders; for evaluating job applicants or applicants for promotions; and for collaborating either within the organization or with parties outside the organization. Since the late twentieth century, theorists have also offered applications outside of organizational theory. MRT can inform recommendations for how to communicate while resolving conflicts, as a way to examine civic engagement and public discourse, or to design distance learning and massive open online courses.

Though originating in organizational and management theory, MRT has applications in a variety of media studies contexts. MRT was first formulated by organizational theorists Richard L. Daft and Robert H. Lengel in the 1980s (originally using the term “information richness” in a 1984 paper), building on information processing theory. Information processing theory is a body of theory dealing with human cognition, predicated on the supposition that human cognition involves processing received information rather than simply responding to a stimulus. Models that describe human cognition in ways similar to computers or computer processes are based in or influenced by information processing theory and usually share a view of the brain’s activity as a series of mechanisms that receive information, work with that information in working memory, or store that information in long-term memory. The actual neurological processes of the brain do not work exactly like a computer: a memory is not stored in a single specific location in the brain, for instance, nor does it simply remain in storage unchanged until deleted, overwritten, or corrupted. But the brain does divide different types of processes (memory, language, muscle movement) among different structures of the brain, and there is sufficient experimental support for the brain-as-computer/machine analogy offered by information processing theory.

Some of the issues examined in information processing theory are the systems by which the brain takes in information from the environment and attaches meaning to that information—not simply the sensory systems that deliver images, sounds, and so forth, but attention, short-term memory, association, and pattern recognition, for example. It developed in the 1960s, with the Atkinson and Shiffrin Model of human memory—consisting of sensory memory (the information received from the senses), short-term memory, and long-term memory—being proposed in 1968 by John William Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin. Information theorists commonly examine the way human cognitive processes work with or produce language, imagery, and symbols, and the relationships between information processing and learning. In recent decades there has been some overlap of both theory and methodology between information processing theory and evolutionary psychology.

Issues

Although host-based computer mail systems were in very limited use among computer professionals and researchers when MRT was first formulated, email didn’t become common even among computer hobbyists until several years later, and it was little used by the general public until the 1990s. Even answering machines, for that matter, did not become commonplace until the breakup of AT&T in the mid-1980s, around the same time that voicemail began to become popular among business customers. As these communication media became common, some of the statements made by MRT were made obsolete, or at least in need of reformulation.

For instance, in the 1990s, as new media became more prevalent, some theorists suggested that the concept of richness should incorporate, or be considered in conjunction with, concurrency. In the past, the time dimension of communication media had been considered mainly in terms of synchrony: either a conversation occurs synchronously (such as a phone call) or asynchronously (letters, email). With email, texting, online chatting, and so on, though, it became possible, and quickly became normal, to maintain multiple conversations at once, not simply by using asynchronous media but because, unlike with phone calls or face-to-face interactions, multiple computer-media conversations do not “talk over” each other, and it is easier to manage attention by directing your focus at each conversation in turn. Texting or email may be leaner media than phone calls or video chat, but this concurrency can still make them preferable in many contexts.

In the twenty-first century, there has been increasing acknowledgment of the appeal of lean media in certain context and to certain groups of people. People with social anxiety and other anxiety disorders, for instance, have offered testimony about the stress-reducing benefits of using texting, online ordering, email, or online chatting in various aspects of their lives, rather than telephone calls or face-to-face interactions. Resistbot and other services have made asynchronous messages to legislative representatives easier, and numerous studies have pointed to the preference for texting over phone calls among younger Millennials and, especially, Generation Z, the latter generation having largely grown up with cell phones, texting, and email (though many studies show that the popularity of email among young people has waned compared to previous generations, with texting preferred for social purposes and collaborative software like Slack for work purposes).

A body of theory that overlaps with MRT is social presence theory, which, while building on ideas introduced in the 1950s in Isaac Asimov’s Robot series, was first articulated in the 1970s by social psychologists John Short, Ederyn Williams, and Bruce Christie. Social presence is the ability of an individual (or the capacity of a medium) to convey his sociality through a communication medium, or in other words, the degree to which the listener feels he is interacting with a person. Social presence theory originally focused on telephone usage, just after the introduction of voicemail. Like MRT it has had to expand to address the internet and changes to telephony.

Terms & Concepts

Asynchronous versus Synchronous Communication: Communication media can be discussed in terms of whether or not they are synchronous, or taking place in real time. Face-to-face communication is synchronous. So are phone calls (excepting voicemail) and video calls. Email and written letters are asynchronous. The lines can blur: when two friends are both at their phones, a text thread may essentially be synchronous, even though texting in general is considered asynchronous because it produces static, persistent communications which can be responded to after any interval.

Collaborative Software: Also called groupware, a type of software that offers a collaborative online workspace. While collaborative software is especially necessary for collaborative editing and project work, over the course of the 2010s it increasingly became a mode of both casual and official workplace conversation in many American workplaces. Many such programs are cloud-based, of which one of the best-known is Slack. Collaborative workspaces may be limited to employees of a specific company (or departments or teams within that company) or colleagues within an industry. Often, people will be members of multiple Slack channels – the official channel for their company, for instance, as well as an informal one for team members, a project-specific one that includes members from multiple companies working on the same project (client-side and vendor-side), and social channels for friends and colleagues in their field.

New Media: Though few of these media are “new” anymore, new media refers to forms of media that use or are made possible by computers, such as computer animation, e-books, social media, video games, and chat rooms. Depending on the context, telephones across the board may be included as new media, or new media may only include later developments in telephony like voicemail, texting, or smartphones.

Paralanguage: Paralanguage consists of the nonlexical (“non-word-related”) components of communication. Though it is most commonly discussed in terms of spoken communication, paralinguistic elements in written communication and sign language exist as well. In spoken communication, paralinguistic elements include body language, tone of voice, pauses, nonlexical utterances like “um,” volume, and prosody. (Some of these elements are believed to have evolved before spoken language, a theory that goes back to Darwin.) These elements are often called paralinguistic cues, especially when they have a meaning or meaning-modifying property that is easily understood by the listener. A simple example is the way questions are asked in English: while a question is sometimes indicated by word order (“Did he get the pizza?”), it can also be indicated by rising intonation (“He ordered a pizza?”), in which case important meaning is conveyed with nothing by tone of voice. Paralanguage often carries information about emotion or the relationship between speakers, and in many cases is unconscious.

Social Cue: Social cues are signals that people send, both consciously and unconsciously, during communication and interactions with other people. They overlap with paralanguage, but social cues are discussed especially in the context of sociality and emotive information. For instance, proximity is a means by which social cues are often conveyed: the physical distance we maintain from someone while talking to him or her is generally determined by how close we are to that person socially. Even our use of the term “close” in this context, or of someone being “emotionally distant,” reflects this. Furthermore, leaning towards someone in conversation can connote that there has been a shift in the type of information being conveyed from public to private, open to secret, impersonal to personal. Withdrawing from someone, similarly, may indicate displeasure or some other negative emotional response to something said. Neurological research has found that different regions of the brain are active when a stimulus is considered in a social context than when the same stimulus is presented in a nonsocial context. Some theorists believe that the human sensitivity to social cues evolved as (or is the result of systems that evolved as) an adaptation to dealing with predators and other hazards; being especially attuned to the reactions of people around us allows us to become aware of danger much faster than if we need to be verbally told “danger, I just heard a tiger over there.”

Social Presence: The ability of an individual to convey a sense of themselves in a communication medium, such that the person or persons with which he is communicating correctly feels like they are interacting with a person rather than simply responding to the information that person presents. A brief memo to the effect of “there will be a blood drive in the lobby” involves little or no social presence; an emotional email about what to do about a problem that has been encountered in a group project involves much more, though both are text-only modes of asynchronous communication.

Bibliography

Armengol, Xavier, et al. "An Examination of the Effects of Self-Regulatory Focus on the Perception of the Media Richness: The Case of E-Mail." International Journal of Business Communication, vol. 54, no. 4, 2017, pp. 394–407. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=125223052&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Aug. 2023.

Brinker, David L., et al. "Inspiring and Informing Citizens Online: A Media Richness Analysis of Varied Civic Education Modalities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 20, no. 5, 2015, pp. 504–519. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=109575922&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Aug. 2023.

Chen, Chia-Chen, & Ya-Ching Chang. "What Drives Purchase Intention on Airbnb? Perspectives of Consumer Reviews, Information Quality, and Media Richness." Telematics & Informatics, vol. 35, no. 5, 2018, pp. 1512–1523. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=129948015&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Aug. 2023.

Kwak, Hyokiin. "Self-Disclosure in Online Media." International Journal of Advertising, vol. 31, no. 3, 2012, pp. 485–510. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=78858398&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Aug. 2023.

Sheer, Vivian C. "Teenagers’ Use of MSN Features, Discussion Topics, and Online Friendship Development: The Impact of Media Richness and Communication Control." Communication Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 1, 2011, pp. 82–103. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=57830680&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Aug. 2023.

Timmerman, C. Erik. "The Moderating Effect of Mindedness/Mindfulness upon Media Richness and Social Influence Explanations of Organizational Media Use." Communication Monographs, vol. 69, no. 2, 2002, pp. 111. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=6923072&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Aug. 2023.