Media synchronicity theory
The Mediensynchronizitätstheorie ( Media Synchronicity Theory ) is an extension of media richness theory and says that not the richness of a medium is important, but its synchronicity , so the extent to cooperate to the people at a time on the same task. It was set up and developed by Alan Dennis and Joseph Valacich.
The media synchronicity theory fixes the potential of media on five factors:
- Immediate feedback : How quickly can a cooperation partner respond to messages?
- Symbol variety : how many ways can information be conveyed?
- Parallelism : On how many channels can how many people cooperate or communicate in different communication processes at the same time?
- Can be revised : How extensively and often can the sender revise their message or contribution before sending it?
- Reusability : How well can the recipient reuse someone else's message or post?
In view of these five factors, it becomes clear that, in absolute terms, there can be no 'rich' and less rich media: reworkability and transfer speed are two opposing quantities; Parallelism and variety of symbols show no direct internal connection. At the core of the consideration are the two factors feedback and parallelism. Media with fast feedback and low parallelism enable high synchronicity; Media with slow feedback and high parallelism allow low synchronicity. For example, electronic brainstorming is a medium for low synchronicity and face-to-face teaching is a medium for high synchronicity.
The media usage is determined by communication and cooperation processes and the demands on the information processing capacity of a medium. There are two types of communication processes: convergent and divergent processes.
- Convergent processes are used to compress information, i.e. to remove ambiguities. They require a high level of synchronicity.
- Divergent processes serve to transmit / distribute information and reduce uncertainties. They require low synchronicity.
literature
- Dennis, Alan & Valacich, Joseph: Rethinking Media Richness: Towards a Theory of Media Synchronicity. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii, 1999.