Modalities such as face-to-face meetings permit rich communication, which involves both expressiveness and interactivity. Modalities such as text annotation or electronic mail, however, limit both. Contingency theory, as applied to collaborative writing, says that as the equivocality of the writing task increases, communication modalities that support rich communication are more likely to be used. In addition, it says that if these modalities are used, equivocal tasks can be carried out with greater ease and better results. This article explores these hypotheses using multiple data sources: an interview study tracing the history of 55 published collaborative articles, two field experiments comparing the use of face-to-face communication and electronic mail as media for collaborative writing, and a laboratory experiment comparing voice and text as media for annotating documents. Taken together, the findings of these investigations are loosely consistent with a contingency theory of media use, but they suggest that careful measures of task characteristics are needed to obtain a detailed understanding of the effects of particular task/technology combinations. Further, they indicate that it may be important to consider the distinction between the interactivity and expressiveness components of media richness in making decisions about what technologies to buy or build.

Both theory and data suggest that that richer, more informal, and more interactive media should be better suited for handling the more complex, equivocal, and emotional aspects of collaborative tasks.To test this hypothesis, we constructed an experiment in which participants were required to make either written or spoken annotations to a document to help a fictional co-author revise it.We seeded relatively error-free texts with errors of different scope .The results provide strong evidence that a richer --in the sense of a more expressive -medium is especially valuable for the more complex, controversial, and social aspects of a collaborative task.Subjects stated that they preferred to use voice to comment on higher-level issues in a document and to use text to deal with lower-level problems of spelling and grammar.When subjects' annotation modalities were restricted, using written annotations led them to comment on more local problems in the text, while using speech Icd lhem to comment on higher level concerns.When lhey did use written annotations to comment on global problems, they were less successful than when they used spoken annotations.Finally, when they offered spoken annotations, they were more likely to add features, such as personal pronouns and explanation, that made their comments more equivocal and socially communicative.These results indicate the uses to which systems that provide voice annotation are likely to be put.

Article Free Access Share on The VideoWindow system in informal communication Authors: Robert S. Fish Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile , Robert E. Kraut Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile , Barbara L. Chalfonte Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '90: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative workSeptember 1990 Pages 1–11https://doi.org/10.1145/99332.99335Online:01 September 1990Publication History 177citation2,054DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations177Total Downloads2,054Last 12 Months142Last 6 weeks20 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF