On Technologically-Mediated Communication & Productivity

Team Leaders' Technology Choice in Virtual Teams

This was an interesting study by Anu Sivunen and Maarit Valo that explored the pros and cons of various technologies available for use with virtual teams. This in-depth, ethnographic exploration of Finnish virtual team leaders examined their choices of communications technologies in daily work, breaking their decision down into four factors, two of them person-related and two task-related. The person-related factors were accessibility or ease of member access through a particular medium, and social distance between members. The two task-related factors were idea sharing or ease of members ability to share ideas, and informing or team leaders ability to share and document information based on the nature of the task (58).

In essence, the study looked to determine what influences communication technology choice to optimally facilitate and support communication between virtual team members. In short, it found landlines, voicemail, and email the most popular conferencing medium and videoconferencing, shared databases, and IM less often used. As an example, the study found videoconferencing not that prevalent because the ability to see the other party rarely adds value to communication in the majority of working contexts while email was popular due to its ubiquity and ease of use.

The study looked at the principle determinants of team leader choice (61) which were based upon:

1. Rational technology, or which technology is chosen that will suit the task best? 

2. Social influence, or which technology is impacted by co-workers' preference? 

3. Adaptive structuration, or which technology choice is a product of the particular culture using it?

Study conclusions found that accessibility was important due to increased mobility of members and whether they had access to the particular medium and were reachable through it. Findings (65) concluded that the characteristics of the situation determined media choice and most important were distance between members, time pressure of the project, and as stated earlier, accessibility of the technology to members. Ultimately, it comes down to the nature of the task at hand, characteristics of the technology, and the team members' ability to access and use it. This study does a good job of proving this.

Mediated Immediacy:

A language of affiliation in a technological age

In this study by Patrick B. O'Sullivan, Stephan K. Hunt, and Lance R. Lippert, the authors remark that accompanying the diffusion of social technology in teaching, important problems in student reactions, notably low student involvement and motivation, and increased isolation have occurred. Despite the promise of new communication technologies to improve teaching and learning, progress in developing well-informed, appropriate, and effective applications of technology has been slow and inconsistent, the authors contend (485).

An ongoing problem with computer mediated communication (CMC) is the lack of non-verbal signals that typically accompany traditional classroom learning environments and that if these important social cues are lost, often times, emotional connectedness seems to be lost as well. The result? In most cases, ineffective or non-existent learning.

Mediated immediacy refers to communicative behaviors that reduce the physical or psychological distance between individuals and foster affiliation between them. The authors state (469) that immediacy can be encouraged through an "approach and avoidance" construct - that people approach things they like and avoid things they don't - as a way to better understand the communicative practices that convey affiliation and foster relationships with communication technologies that can achieve a positive outcome.

The authors point out (470) that research has demonstrated students learn most from teachers who are warm, friendly, immediate, approachable, and fostering of close, professionally appropriate personal relationships. Use of immediacy is an important element of this. Mediated immediacy, according to the authors, are communicative cues that can help shape perceptions of psychological closeness and help promote appropriate educational intimacy with students to reduce anxiety and uncertainty and improve attitudes towards the instructor and course. 

In this vein, important mediated immediacy cues were found to be those that promoted instructor approachability and his/her regard for students. The study found that these cues can be both linguistic and presentational. Linguistic cues incorporated into written course content can include informality, self-disclosure, politeness and a friendly, conversational tone to the voice of the content. This bodes well for their integration into text-based technologies such as email, chat rooms, and web pages, assuming of course, that students are appropriately engaged with the content. Presentational cues are more graphical in nature and can include the use of color, the instructor's photo, and a sense of informality in material design, notably, but not limited to web sites.

Study results generally supported the hypothesis that incorporating multiple immediacy cues produced both lower uncertainty and increased motivation towards the instructor and course by study participants. Further, the study determined that using more cues didn't produce significantly lower levels of anxiety, although this relationship was in the predicted direction.

This is an interesting study. As a college instructor in the process of repurposing my course to be delivered as more of a blended hybrid, it provides me with some good implications for incorporating appropriate mediated immediacy cues in writing and designing CMC course materials with sensitivity towards student anxiety and related decreased motivation. One point that will always be a challenge is determining with a good degree of accuracy, those who have issues and those that don't. Often times, this isn't readily apparent with students until unfortunately, much time and educational opportunity has passed.

On Work & Play in a User-Generated World

Going Mobile: Cell Phones in Context

At the beginning of this chapter, author Naomi Baron mentions her 1998 train ride on a Quiet Car in Britain where talking on your mobile phone was prohibited. And this was more than a decade ago. I watched a show on the German Autobahn and nobody talks on mobile phones or texts or eats while driving. Germans take driving very seriously, just as the Britons take train courtesy seriously. 

Sometimes I feel the Europeans are much more advanced than us in this regard. Maybe it's because mobile phones came into being much sooner in Europe than here in the US. But I think it's something more. I'm generalizing, but I think Americans seem to care less if their actions are discourteous or annoying to others around them than those of other cultures. My wife and I stopped going to movies because of cell phones and talkers in theaters. But I digress.

The author mentions (132) she's yet to hear of any Americans using their mobiles for beeping (providing a single ring and hanging up to save money) as a thrift measure. She doesn't know the Aveni's. My daughter gives me a single ring on her cell phone to let me know she's on her way home to save on minutes. That's been the rule for years, still in place even though our service has dropped from .25/minute down to a dime. It's the principle of it. And it's kept her conscious to save money where possible.

The author remarks about the Silence on the Chikatetsu (subway) in Japan. I was in Japan for 3 weeks in the early 90's and can attest to this. It is a social transgression to be loud or distracting when riding on mass transit in Japan. Generally, courtesy (and get along-ness) is paramount in Japan for 2 reasons: First, because it's improper to stand out among the crowd and second, because it's so densely populated that without cooperation among citizens, Japanese society wouldn't be able to function. My most used word phrase in Japan was, "non ban sen" meaning which tracks do I go to? By the time I'd show my ticket and typically get a response from the gatekeeper, 15 people had lined up behind me and not once did anyone say hurry up. As Baron remarks, (133), "crowds keep moving - but in silence."

I was in Japan before the prevalence of mobile phones but I remember the young girls with their Hello Kitty pagers looking just like we do today with our phones. Indeed, as Kenichi Ishii remarks in Implications of Mobility, Japanese youth culture in the mid-1990s embraced a unique form of communication called berutomo (pager friends) especially among schoolgirls (349). Pager friends did not know each other’s names and had never met; however, they knew the pager numbers of their correspondents. They exchanged short messages such as ‘‘hello’’ and ‘‘good night’’ on their pagers almost everyday and sometimes even talked to each other about their personal problems via pagers (Ishii, 2004). I thought this was fascinating but unique to Japan and I'd never see something like that here. Hah.

In America, just as in Japan, these devices are, as Baron states, truly keitai, (something you carry with you) a "snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device and mundane presence in everyday life" (134). This is a perfect definition for cell phones, particularly for young girls. It's way more than communications when my daughter has to have her phone next to her when she's sleeping and has to bring it to the dinner table. I took her phone for a day because of bad grades. Pulling off fingernails would've been less painful. Grades are better now.

The People We Become: 

The Cost of Always Being On

I love humorist Dave Barry's remark, "... I prefer email because it's such an effective way of getting information to somebody without running the risk of becoming involved in human conversation" (220). I think this just about sums this chapter up. But I do think it's hard to say whether the internet decreases the strength of of our close social relationships. I think only if we let it.

You gonna pick up if I call?

Maybe we should evaluate technology like the Amish bishops do: Does it bring us together or draw us apart? Rheingold (223) interviewed an Amish man about getting a telephone. The man said, "What would that lead to? We don't want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It's not just how you use the technology. We're also concerned about the kind of person you become when you use it."

So what kind of people do we become by using the technology? When I think that we don't seem to care if how we communicate in public is discourteous or annoying to others and some have stopped going to movies because of it, I'm apt to wonder about this just as Baron has. For what it's worth, since I untethered from a mobile phone after my previous job 6 years ago, I think I listen better and appreciate more of the ambience around me now, including people. Maybe that's what the Amish are talking about. Although I don't expect others to ever untether, every once and a while, I bet many might enjoy it.

The Death of Social Schizophrenia

As a baby boomer, I never really thought about how I've spent my life in a schizophrenic world but I guess I have: teacher, student, dad, husband, son, brother, boss, subordinate and many more - each with a different role and somewhat different persona. Yea, I guess if through social media every person of significance in my life could see me in every other role I have to play, I'd likely appear to be a very different person to them. 


But I think Qualman in this chapter is implying I'm not being genuine playing all these roles when he says, "People are best off being comfortable in their own skin and not pretending to be anything that they aren't" (120). And that social media is some sort of remedy to this: by living with more transparency through the network, I'll be somehow better off by only having to be one person or personality or essence. Hmm. Frankly, I believe I'm more well-rounded having to live with the challenges of all these different roles and succeed within them.

On Agency, Authority and Trust

Privacy, Trust, and Disclosure Online

Most of the research cited in this article by Carina B. Paine Schofield and Adam N. Joinson goes back a number of years, showing that the issue of online privacy has and remains a very big deal. It seems that we need to continue to divulge more and more about ourselves to have access to what we want to find and purchase online. No doubt that if data miners really wanted to compile a file on any of us, they'd likely be able to do so. 

Indeed, just as the authors remark about actual (objective) privacy and perceived (subjective) privacy, (p. 15) although they coexist, there's often a mismatch between the two. We think we have a lot of control when we limit what we divulge in an online store, but we really don't know who or what is compiling our "footprint" or click path (which divulges a ton about us) to get there or anywhere else we go online and whether this information gets released to a 3rd party unbeknownst to us. I don't even want to know what Google knows about me. I've always found it curious that we trust our credit card numbers to high schoolers at convenience stores but get all fired up about the same card number online, as if people are somehow less nefarious if we see them in person.

Regarding building trust online, the authors allude to techniques (p. 21) that are important in building trust, including linguistic cues. This reminds me of the importance of establishing ethos from Dr. Anheier's course. I'll go the authors one more and say what's personally important in web site trust-building to me is a FAQ section and even better is a Forums section where real folks have posted their opinions about the site's products and service. I think predictability and dependability are the most important components to trusting a web merchant. The longer I use the merchant and receive the same results, the more I tend to trust it.

I had to buy some cold medicine the other day at Walgreens. It used to be on the shelves, now it's over the counter at the pharmacy. Apparently it has an active ingredient in it can be used to make methamphetamine. To purchase it, I had to provide my drivers license. The clerk inputted everything on it into a monitoring database. I asked her why she did this. She said it was a federal law that she must do this and she also needed it to monitor my purchasing behavior to limit how often I can purchase it. She assured me that my information would go no further than Walgreens. I don't believe her.

A Social Skill Account of Problematic Internet Use

Author Scott E. Caplan refers to what are now fairly old studies in his article. The model proposed and tested here predicted that individuals who lack self-presentational skills are especially likely to prefer online social interaction over face-to-face communication. Further, this model predicted that a preference for online social interaction fosters compulsive Internet use, which results in negative outcomes. I don't think there's any surprise to these results, knowing what we now have come to know over the last decade about those that spend too much time on the Internet.

I'm surprised that the researchers, Morahan-Martin and Schumacher (2000) and Young (1998) could identify problematic Internet users, (those with psychosocial problems like anxiety, loneliness, and depression) well enough through their survey techniques to confidently make this correlation. I'd think these types of subjects might not be so objective about themselves and also, that psychosocial problems seem to me to be so nebulous. But apparently they were able to.

These studies make me think about the msnbc show, To Catch a Predator with Dateline NBC correspondent Chris Hansen. It's obvious from the show that sexual predators using chat rooms to lure children come in all shapes and sizes - those with psychosocial issues and those without. This is what makes these study correlations so intriguing to me. 

Young's study observed that whereas nondependent Internet users spent most of their time online using email and the web, dependent users spent most of their time online using synchronous interpersonal communication applications like chat rooms and interactive multiplayer games. I know some big-time gamers. One's a nephew and another's a tenant. I'd profile both of them as lacking social skills in this way, so considering my survey of two, I think there's merit to this.

I agree with the authors. I'm surprised as well that Internet researchers have not devoted more attention to this subject.