I am a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Incorporated, an African American Greek Letter Organization on campus. We host programs on campus and in the community which often cost a hefty sum to hold. Although we do get funding, sometimes it is not enough to pay for everything so every year we do something to raise some extra funds. Last week my fraternity was planning a fund raiser for next semester in order to raise some extra cash. Unfortunately me and a few others weren't able to make it to the meeting because we had educational obligations. The members that were at the meeting did want our opinion so we decided to give input via text message and some through gchat.
Being one of the people who was not present at the meeting I could definitely tell the difference between everybody being all together and everyone being distributed. Being that I was on my cell phone texting, I usually got an abbreviated summarized version of what was going on. Like Bos et al. the "in group" or the people at the meeting gave a lot more ideas and got a lot more feedback for the ideas that they were giving.
The lack of information increased due to the fact that I couldn't keep up with a lot of what the group was doing because it is a lot faster to talk than it is to text. It was hard for me to do what I was doing at the time while keeping up with the group meeting so for long periods of time there were gaps in communication.
On top of all that was going on because we were separated the in group more or less discussed and explained decisions that they had amongst themselves so they had a deeper understanding for why they wanted to do certain ideas. Because Me and those few were in the out-group we got summaries of what they wanted to do but we really didn't know why they were making those decisions. Because they were together they all agreed on a few things while the out groups were creating separate ideas that weren't put together as well as the in group.
In the end when we discussed the ideas later on we did realize why we took the steps that we did and we were able to agree on a lot of the ideas, but hybrid configurations were not great for those particular tasks. The group only got on the same page when we met later on in the week to discuss the ideas in person.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
This is a good example of how technology, specifically instant messaging, isn't nearly as fast or effective as face to face contact. People are just innately better at communicating without any technological barriers. I imagine that the people using gchat were much more active in the conversations than those just using text messaging.
ReplyDeleteWhat type of information was being sent/received through texting? Our class's existing knowledge base would suggest that deciding on objective facts through text message would be innately more effective than a philosophical debate through the phone. Additionally when you have a shared or single display, everyone is being presented with the same information you choose to display. With this configuration, your opinion is known only through another medium. You have no control over whether your comments are being faithfully, or accurately delivered.
ReplyDeleteI was going to discuss this same thing in my post, but decided to switch it up once I saw your post here. But in a nutshell, We do the same thing for our Chapter meetings, but with webcams+chat, for brothers that are out of town (perhaps doing Cornell in DC or semester at sea). I've noticed in some cases, when the "outgroup" is novel enough, everyone in person yeilds to the opinions/voice of the more novel interaction interface. In particular, everyone was enthralled by the brother who was out at sea webcamming, so he was the focus of the meeting, and also became the pusher of our final opinion.
ReplyDelete