Text vs Voice
At its core my PhD is about the way different properties of communication media cause people to choose and use the media differently.
Research into media effects on communication dates back to the 1950s, when video-conferencing and voice telephony were mooted as replacements for face-to-face business meetings. Meetings mediated by the transmission of sound and video were potentially much cheaper than face-to-face meetings enabled by long-distance travel. Researchers were interested in how well mediated meetings stacked up against the real thing. Later, text-based communication via networked computers – computer-mediated communication – became another alternative to face-to-face communication. Recently, the widespread availability of broadband Internet has allowed CMC users to add voice, video and avatar gestures to their palette of media.
By the 1980s, it was assumed that communication media could be arrayed in order of “richness”, from face-to-face communication, through shared video and then audio, to text media such as email, and that users would normally choose the richest medium available. However users often do not, and subsequent research has identified a variety of ways in which media differ and which influence users to choose one or another medium in different situations.
I’ve summarized current understanding of the differences between voice- and text-based communication in this diagram.
What do these dimensions mean?
* Social distance, or its converse social presence, represent the extent to which people one communicates with seem to “be there” in person. You’d expect more of this when using rich media.
* Media differ in the amount of information that is incidentally transmitted about the people communicating along with the messages that are deliberately transmitted. For example, listening to Morse code says almost nothing about the person tapping out the code, while listening to someone’s voice can give hints about their gender, age, nationality, socioeconomic class and other properties.
* Different media may flatten or amplify existing real-world hierarchies, leading either to equality or participation, or domination of the channel by people with high offline status (France et al 2001). This is relevant when groups rather than pairs of people share a channel, and could be interpreted as either good or bad.
* Some media, such as video and audio conferencing, are best suited to synchronous communication, in which people talk in real time. When people need to communicate asynchronously they tend to choose text media such as email. When using asynchronous methods, people may use the longer time between transmissions as a resource, to multitask, or fine-tune a response before sending it.
* Some media lend themselves to users being able to store messages for later reprocessing, which also usually requires being able to search through the stored messages. Computers can search through text far more efficiently than other media.
* When a group of users is communicating in order to coordinate action in real time, a medium that supports fast, precise transmission of meaning, and the ability to quickly remove uncertainty, is preferred. Voice media such as two-way radio are frequently used for this.
* The utility of a medium may depend on how well the group using it know each other – and/or the medium – prior to use. People who know each other are more comfortable using voice than are groups of strangers, who tend to be shy or reserved, and may prefer a text medium. Haythornethwaite (2002) discussed the different use of media by strong- and weak-tie pairs, arguing that the introduction of a new medium might dissolve existing weak-tie connections that don’t translate to the new medium.
* Many people find they can easily maintain multiple simultaneous conversations with an appropriately configured text medium, while when using voice transmission or face-to-face this can turn into a mess.
Properties of media, properties of situations, and properties of users
In different situations, different criteria will be more or less important to a user’s choice of communication medium. For example, when a user’s friends are off-line, the need for asynchronicity may dictate the use of text, whereas many MMORPG guilds coordinate group tactics using voice.
Media choice and effects depend, not just on the properties of media, but on a user’s personality and preferences. For example, Goby (2006) found different preferences for online vs face-to-face interaction by different Myers-Briggs personality types.
A criterion of particular importance in the context of virtual world use is social distance, or the degree to which different media transmit personal information about the sender. In older media research it was often assumed that users would prefer richer media that reduced social distance. The popularity of CMC such as email shows this is not always the case. A key feature of virtual worlds is that they support identity- and role-play. Some users of online worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life consider themselves to be playing a character. Virtual worlds support this by representing users as customizable avatars that needn’t resemble the user. Because a person’s voice transmits more information about the person than does text, role-players typically prefer text to voice.
Other influences over media choice
Some researchers point out that choice of a medium is not necessarily based on the properties of the medium. Sometimes a user’s choice is dictated by their boss or an organization to which they belong. Sometimes a user will simply choose the medium that most of his/her communication partners have chosen. There is a strong critical mass effect in choosing how to communicate: If all the people you want to communicate use mobile phones, or SMS, or Facebook, or email … then you’ll probably choose that medium too, regardless of whether it is your first choice.
Nonetheless, once a medium is chosen, it is the properties of the medium, in combination with properties of the people using it and their communication scenario, that influences the communication taking place.