Successful and unsuccessful multicommunication episodes: Engaging in dialogue or juggling messages?

This paper describes instances of multicommunicating—or engaging in more than one conversation at a time. It uses a critical incident technique to explore successful and unsuccessful incidents of multicommunicating from the perspective of 201 MBA students. Additionally, we asked which media individu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Information systems frontiers 2010-07, Vol.12 (3), p.277-285
Main Authors: Turner, Jeanine Warisse, Reinsch, N. Lamar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business and Management
Communicating
Communication
Control
Conversation
Errors
Flexibility
Information systems
Information technology
Instant messaging
IT in Business
Management of Computing and Information Systems
Media richness
Messages
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Professionals
Students
Studies
Systems Theory
Text messaging
Texts
Verbal communication
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Summary:This paper describes instances of multicommunicating—or engaging in more than one conversation at a time. It uses a critical incident technique to explore successful and unsuccessful incidents of multicommunicating from the perspective of 201 MBA students. Additionally, we asked which media individuals pair together when multicommunicating. We found very frequent pairing of the telephone (which provides partial compartmentalization but no flexibility of tempo) with electroric text (which provides both compartmentalization and flexibility of tempo). We also found that respondents provide a variety of reasons for labeling a particular episode as “unsuccessful.” In many cases the person seemed to describe an episode as unsuccessful when the person or a communicating partner had exceeded his or her ability to juggle multiple conversations as demonstrated by communication errors.
ISSN:1387-3326
1572-9419
DOI:10.1007/s10796-009-9175-y