Article Free Access Share on Computer-mediated communication and collaborative writing: media influence and adaptation to communication constraints Authors: Jolene Galegher View Profile , Robert E. Kraut View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative workDecember 1992 Pages 155–162https://doi.org/10.1145/143457.143474Published:01 December 1992Publication History 15citation1,083DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations15Total Downloads1,083Last 12 Months45Last 6 weeks3 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

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.

To work together on complex projects, people must agree on a set of shared goals, coordinate the actions of contributors, and weave the components they have created independently into a unified whole. These activities are the basic components of intellectual teamwork—people working together over substantial periods of time to create information-intensive products. Intellectual teamwork demands extensive information sharing and coordination, but these communication needs vary over time and over tasks. These projects typically involve an initial phase during which group members settle on an interpretation of the problem, define their goals and plan their work, an execution phase during which group members may work independently to carry out the various tasks associated with the project, and an integration phase during which group members must bring their individual inputs together to create a final product [Biks90; Finh90; Krau88; McGr90).These variations suggest that different communication modalities may be useful at successive stages in the life of a long-term project. A relatively static medium such as writing may be sufficient for exchanging information, but tasks that involve ambiguous goals, multiple perspectives, and information that is susceptible to multiple interpretations—characteristics of the planning and integrative phases of intellectual teamwork—are typically associated with high levels of direct, informal, face-to-face communication [Daft81; Daft87; Tush78, Tush79; Vand76]. Face-to-face interaction can support the rich communication required for integrative work, but creating the conditions to support face-to-face communication can be expensive, and sometimes, logistically impossible.Of course, other forms of communication—telephones, for instance—are available to counter these disadvantages. Telephones permit easy communication across both short and long distances, and they support naturalistic interaction embodying many of the features of Face-to-Face conversation. Nevertheless, as anyone who has ever played an extended game of “telephone tag” knows, they require the sender and the receiver to be simultaneously available. This limitation is inconsistent with current communication needs in business and science, both of which are becoming, on the one hand, more geographically and temporally distributed, and, on the other, more interconnected.

In this paper, we describe the influence of physical proximity on the development of collaborative relationships between scientific researchers and on the execution of their work. Our evidence is drawn from our own studies of scientific collaborators, as well as from observations of research and development activities collected by other investigators. These descriptions provide the foundation for a discussion of the actual and potential role of communications technology in professional work, especially for collaborations carried out at a distance.

What are the requirements on computer- and telecommunications-based tools to aid groups in producing intellectual products? In this article we examine research collaborations as a particularly informative example of group work and propose a framework for describing research collaboration that should provide guidance to those developing technology to support collaborative work. The framework is based on 50 semistructured interviews with researchers in psychology, management science, and computer science. It focuses on the problems in forming and maintaining personal relationships and completing tasks that researchers must solve to have a successful collaboration. These problems occur when collaborators are initiating projects, executing them, and documenting results.

Most computer-based aids for researchers and other workers have had individuals rather than groups or teams as their beneficiaries. This is unfortunate, since much work in business, government, and academia is performed by groups of people. In this paper we examine research collaborations as a particularly informative example of group work and propose a model of research collaboration that should provide guidance to those developing technology to support collaborative work. The model is based on 50 semi-structured interviews with researchers in psychology, management science, and computer science. It focuses on the problems in forming and maintaining personal relationships and completing tasks that researchers must solve to have a successful collaboration. These problems occur when collaborators are initiating projects, executing them, and documenting results.