Digital Technology and Uncertainty Reduction: Does Media Richness affect Anticipated Future Interaction?
Dawn Marie Fichera
New Media and twenty-four hour connectivity to the world around us is quickly becoming the norm rather than the exception. From the classroom to the boardroom, technological innovations influence the way we communicate, collaborate, and share information with one another. Digital technology has made person-to-person accessibility an art form, while mobility, ease of use, and accessibility of emergent technological advancements in communication have created new strategies for relational development.
As communicators progressively move their interaction with each other to the online world, both users and targets of social media sites supply interpersonal information online, contributing to the reduction of uncertainty and have lasting and immediate effect on Anticipated Future Interaction (AFI), which is the desire to interact with another communicator in the near future as a result of initial exposure to their social media site. Social media tools like pictures, games, forums, blogs, and video contribute to the richness of the medium and have a significant effect on uncertainty reduction, leading to an increase in AFI.
New methods of looking at social interaction, such as the conceptual model proposed below depicting the framework with which to view the relationship between media richness, uncertainty, and anticipated interaction aid in the understanding of the complex relationship between communicators using social media sites.
Figure 1. Conceptual Model
As the model illustrates, use of multi-media tools affects the varying levels of media richness and is expected to have a profound affect on uncertainty levels and how communicators seek and process information about each other. The more users employ the tools available on a particular social media site, the more rich their communication will be, and the greater likelihood that future interaction will be sought between the person in the social media profile and the one viewing it.
As communicators engage with the social media site, they are exposed to varying degrees of media richness through the available contextual, aural, and textual cues. A media rich site on Social Media Sites (SMS) like Facebook allows for a greater amount of social information to exchange between communicators and reduced uncertainty resulting in positive AFI. Through use of information seeking strategies, the information acquired, processed, and evaluated within the confines of SMS contribute to a reduction in uncertainty and an increased desire for AFI.
These new models help us extend our knowledge of online communication and give us the ability to see the new communication world through fresh lenses. In order to accomplish this, scholars need to understand that users and targets become acquainted with each other online through social media tools, textual cues, and textually conveyed information, rather than relying on traditional face-to-face nonverbal cues.
