Construct · 4 names · 5 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
● jangle · four names, one richness idea Nearest construct by meaningrichnesscompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to media richness is richness.
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The capacity of a communication medium to carry rich information, defined by four features: the immediacy of its feedback, the number of cues it conveys, the variety of language it supports, and its personal focus. Daft and Lengel's 1986 Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design ranked media from face-to-face conversation at the rich end down to unaddressed documents at the lean end, and argued that managers should match a medium's richness to a task's equivocality. Daft, Lengel, and Trevino tested the idea in 1987 and reported that better-performing managers were the ones who sent equivocal messages through richer channels. This is the referent construct on the map: the claim that a channel has a fixed capacity to convey rich information, which every other name here reworks. The four features, the ranking of media, and the rule about matching richness to equivocality are all from Daft and Lengel.[1][2]
The extent to which a medium lets people work together at the same moment on the same thing, sharing a coordinated pattern of behaviour. Dennis, Fuller, and Valacich's 2008 Media, Tasks, and Communication Processes noted that media richness theory had mixed empirical support and rebuilt the idea around five capabilities: transmission velocity, parallelism, symbol sets, rehearsability, and reprocessability. In place of one richness ranking they split communication into two processes, the conveyance of new information and the convergence on shared meaning, and argued that lean media can suit conveyance while rich, high-synchronicity media suit convergence. The construct keeps Daft and Lengel's premise that media differ in capacity but rejects the single ordering, so a medium is no longer simply rich or lean. What was one richness scale becomes a profile of capabilities matched to a process.[3]
A person's perception of how rich a medium is, treated as something learned from experience rather than fixed by the channel. Carlson and Zmud's 1999 Channel Expansion Theory and the Experiential Nature of Media Richness Perceptions argued that richness is not a stable property of a medium but grows as a communicator builds experience with the channel, the topic, the partner, and the organisational setting. Two people using the same email system can perceive very different richness, and one person's perception can rise as they use it more. The construct keeps the word richness but moves it from the medium to the perceiver, which undercuts any fixed ranking of channels. This is the sharpest break on the map: the thing being measured is no longer a feature of the technology at all.[4]
The degree to which a medium lets the people using it feel that others are present, experienced as the warmth and sociability of the contact. Short, Williams, and Christie's 1976 book The Social Psychology of Telecommunications placed media on a single dimension of social presence, from face-to-face at the high end to text at the low end, and this ordering is one of the roots Daft and Lengel drew on when they built richness. The two ideas sit close enough that studies sometimes use one scale to stand in for the other, which is the jangle in miniature. This page keeps social presence only as the antecedent of richness; the construct has its own full treatment, with its own collisions, at the page for presence. The difference worth holding onto is that presence is about feeling another person there, while richness is about carrying information.[5]
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