Between you and me…
is a Machine
It is Distance
Meaning
A medium is a machine – not one that merely transmits your thoughts to another person; but, rather, it is a system that breaks down, transforms, and reproduces what you intend to mean.
“meaning derives from interactive interpretation by multiple persons, not simply from the cognition of a single individual” (Miranda and Saunders, 2003)*
Whereas a machine converts one form of energy into another, a medium transforms one kind of expression into another.
Examples
Email, phones, letters, texts, memos, missives, videoconferencing, Zoom, Skype, keyboards, screens, microphones, speakers, televisions, books, and even language itself.
“Face to face contacts are increasingly being replaced by devices which radically change the patterns of human interaction so well established in the past. As Miller (1976) points out, “There is bound to be a decline in the satisfaction of certain individual needs, for much of our humanity is acquired by direct experiences with other persons and with our environments as a whole” (pp. 5, 6).
Felipe Korzenny, 1977*
Ideology
“…embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another…It is what Wittgenstein meant when, in referring to our most fundamental technology, he said that language is not merely a vehicle of thought but also the driver.” *
Both Kesey and Kundera noted that contingent upon partaking in an ideology is a weight – a responsibility that comes with partaking in that ideology. Even more broadly, there is a weight shouldered by those subjected to ideological systems: bear the weight of its premises or bear the weight of rejecting it.
Control
“…new technologies compete with old ones -for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view. This competition is implicit once we acknowledge that a medium contains an ideological bias.”*
It’s self-evident that new forms of communication vye for your attention, time, and money. Nowhere is this more evident than in popular social media feeds and algorithms that readily serve up satisfying content.
The truth is far more Machiavellian: these new media demand you understand the world through their perspective – their interpretation – their truth – their conception of reality.
While the written word emphasizes logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline, newer media elevate imagery, simultaneity, immediacy, gratification, and quick emotional responses. It’s no wonder that new forms of rendering reality in such ways has preceded extreme political and cultural divisiveness, heightened emotionality, and an inability to bridge chasms of belief.
How Close Are We – Propinquity
Different media transmit greater and lesser feelings of intimacy. A father and daughter may feel agonizingly far away from each other speaking on the phone during a deployment, while POWs could feel intimately close tapping a plumbing pipe at night using Morse code.
How close we feel – in time and space – is called propinquity. Electronic propinquity is how effectively a medium conveys “I’m here”. Some media specifically say “I’m not here. Be glad,” such as a memo from your boss, while others attempt to do the opposite, such as a Zoom call while your nephew graduates college on the other side of the country. “I’m right there with you, right now.”
“Propinquity, or proximity, is considered to be the system’s trait which is essential for the continuation of the human communication system.
Felipe Korzenny, 1977*
Propinquity, then, constitutes a basic condition for interaction when the object of knowledge is a person. This interaction process usually takes the form of what we call communication.”
Communication Media Capabilities and Characteristics
Primary Characteristics
Electronic Propinquity Theory
Media Richness Theory
- language variety
- immediacy of feedback
- personal focus
- multicplicity of cues
- social influence
- channel variety
- bandwidth
- mutual directionality
- channel variety
- rules of a medium
- social presence
- interactivity
Capabilities (Media Synchronicity Theory*)
- Transmission velocity – facilitates closed-loop communication (subsumes immediacy of feedback and interactivity)
- Parallelism (width) – the degree to which a medium allows for multitasking or demands full attention
- Symbol variety (height) “…determines the possibility to express various messages and meanings over a medium” (replaces multiplicity of cues and language variety)
- Rehearsability – the allowance of a sender to consider, rethink, and revise a message prior to sending
- Reprocessability – the extent to which a sender or receiver can revisit a packet at a later time
“Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse…it changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content…”
N.P. 1985*
Research
Testing Media Richness Theory in the New Media: The Effects of Cues, Feedback, and Task – A.R. Dennis & S.T. Kinney, 1998
This study focuses on new media and two key elements of MRT: cues (vocal inflection, gestures, sighs) and feedback.
Four factors supposedly influence the richness: 1. The ability of the medium to transmit multiple cues (vocal inflection, gestures), 2. immediacy of feedback, 3. language variety, and 4. the personal focus of the medium. Feedback takes two forms: concurrent (often nonverbal or paraverbal) and sequential.
The study found that hypotheses 1a and 2a were supported: Performance improves as multiplicity of cues increases and Performance improves as immediacy of feedback increases.
A Theory of Electronic Propinquity: Mediated Communication in Organizations. Korzenny, F. (1978).
Korzenny begins by drawing our attention to the prerequisites of space and time for knowledge, and that technology has allowed us to conquer space – as the telegraph noted.
“Electronic propinquity allows for the possibility of communication, but isn’t communication itself.” (pg. 7)
He goes on to quote Weick in saying that humans create the environment – or (perhaps) mediascape – to which the system then adapts. The human actor doesn’t react to the environment, he enacts it.
Media Appropriateness: Using Social Presence Theory to Compare Traditional and New Organizational Media – R. E. Rice, 1993
“The present research focuses on a few primary media characteristics associated with two related theories: social presence and media richness. Both emphasize how communication media differ in the extent to which they (a) can overcome various communication constraints of time, location permanence, distribution, and distance; (b) transmit the social, symbolic, and nonverbal cues of human communication; and (c) convey equivocal information.”
Aspects of communication:
Interpersonal versus mediated and synchronous versus asynchronous. These two dichotomies can be thought of as reflecting the two primary social psychology concepts underlying the social presence concept: intimacy and immediacy.
“Kant postulates space and time as the two basic categories that make human knowledge possible. Space and time are also, as a consequence, the most primitive conditions for perception. In a related manner, space and time, as physical dimensions, determine not only the way in which we know, and what we know, but more fundamentally the possibility of knowing at all.”
Felipe Korzenny, 1977
- Daft, R. L., & Lengel, R. H. (1986). Organizational information requirements, media richness, and structural design. Management Science, 32(5), 554–571.
- Daft, R. L., Lengel, R. H., & Trevino, L. K. (1987). Message equivocality, media selection, and manager performance: Implications for information systems. MIS Quarterly, 11(3), 355–366.
- Dennis, A. R., Fuller, R. M., & Valacich, J. S. (2008). Media, tasks, and communication processes: A theory of media synchronicity. MIS Quarterly, 32(3), 575–600. https://doi.org/10.2307/25148857
- Dennis, A. R., & Kinney, S. T. (1998). Testing media richness theory in the new media environment. MIS Quarterly, 22(3), 411–440.
- Korzenny, F. (1978). A Theory of Electronic Propinquity: Mediated Communication in Organizations. Communication Research, 5(1), 3-24
- McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the massage: An inventory of effects. Random House.
- Postman, N. (2005). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business (20th anniversary ed.). Penguin Books.
- Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Alfred A. Knopf.
- Walther, J. B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1), 3–43.
- Walther, J. B. & Bazarova, N.N. (2008). Validation and Application of Electronic Propinquity Theory to Computer-Mediated Communication in Groups. Cornell University.