Investigating the Media Preferences of Technical Communicators (3)
MRT and the Findings of the 2006 Survey
According to Daft and Lengel (1984), media richness is a function of four key criteria:
- the medium’s capacity for immediate feedback
- the number of cues and channels available
- language variety
- the degree to which intent is focused on the recipient
(The greater social presence of a medium creates increased immediacy of and reception for the message, due to the higher number of channels used in conveyance.)
Practically, these criteria translate to a five-media continuum, from simple to complex:
- Face-to-face (meetings, etc.): richest
- Telephone: rich
- Written (personal): moderate
- Written (formal): lean
- Numeric (formal): leanest
It is worth noting here that the most essential content communicated in the technical authorship process is closest in nature to (3), (4), and (5) on the foregoing continuum.
While I accept the MRT tenet that communication media have varying capacities for resolving ambiguity, MRT is rooted in two assumptions that are less robust:
- People want to overcome equivocality and uncertainty in organizations – Presumable but not universally true: some organizations purposefully complicate communication for internecine and protective purposes.
- A variety of media commonly used in organizations work better for certain tasks than others – The various media do not map faithfully to the simple five-point continuum that Daft and Lengel propose. The continuum makes no allowances for combined media that are, via multimedia technology, increasingly available.
Daft and Lengel (1984) concluded that written media in organizations work better for certain tasks than others. Specifically, written media is preferable for unequivocal messages, while face-to-face media was preferred for messages containing “equivocality”. On the evidence of the 2006 survey, I am critical of the merit of these conclusions – for their irrelevance to technical writing and their lack of cultural portability.
While simple messages require little in the way of disambiguation and are therefore suited to simpler media (notes, memos, etc[1]), transference of complex material within complex interpersonal situations on the other hand entails extensive disambiguation and therefore requires, according to MRT, richer media such as a face-to-face meetings.
However, contrary to Daft and Lengel’s theory, the overall findings of the 2006 survey indicate that equivocality is better resolved by leaner, not richer, media (see the Comparative Results of Surveys by Channel graphs, Appendix 1.). Meetings (the richest medium) are successful in multicultural situations only if the participants are adequately proficient at interaction, speaking the same language (literally and figuratively), and can read, successfully interpret, and effectively apply each other’s input (verbal, non-verbal, and otherwise). Leaner media, on the other hand, constrain the above listed variables and are thus superior for conveying facts and figures, which are the substance of technical writing.
Next in the hierarchy of media richness is the telephone, a medium that is peculiarly subject to cultural influences and whose utilization is reliably compromised when multilingual situations constitute context (the marked difference in responses to question 1 bears this out). [2]
Additionally, although MRT posits that fact-to-face communication is the richest communication medium (and the findings of intercultural studies such as Sechrest et al 1982 also suggest that face-to-face communication is preferable in multicultural encounters), on the basis of the 2006 survey, this assertion cannot be confidently extended enough to propose that face-to-face interaction is the superior medium for acquiring specific facts within a multicultural, multilingual, corporate environment.[3]
MRT declares that effective communicators perform rational choices in matching the most appropriate communication medium to particular tasks or message content (Daft, Lengel, and Trevino, 1987). Whether “rational” equates to “conscious” is not distinct in this assertion, yet the difference has significant implications, which are magnified (again) by the multicultural/lingual situation – where what is said is often not what is heard. This language equivalence issue forces conjecture that all communication between speakers of different languages contains equivocality – and this, if supportable, would contribute to explaining the preference of the 2006 survey respondents for the e-mail channel.
MRT is based on a theory of management: contingency theory. MRT was not overtly formulated to elucidate Technical Communication processes, and is on the evidence of the current survey’s findings, less pertinent yet to Technical Communication practice in Japan.
[1] Memos, notes, and other non-addressed media are not used in Japanese work environments for anything more complex than phone messages.
[2] After telephone comes e-mail, letter (redundant in these studies), note, memo, and finally special report, which resonates with “document review” – an activity that is too hazardous in terms of time and interpersonal harmony to merit serious consideration within the characteristically group-centric Asiatic scenario (Cathcart and Cathcart, 1982).
[3] Many, if not most, information work tasks involve disambiguation, but clarification activity in the Japanese workplace is a structured, formal affair that is not, by convention, conducted directly through face-to-face meetings. Both in purpose and format (Doi, 1982), meetings of all sorts are radically different to their counterparts in Anglophone organizations.