MEDIA APPROPRIATENESS - USING SOCIAL PRESENCE THEORY TO COMPARE TRADITIONAL AND NEW ORGANIZATIONAL MEDIA

This study assesses a scale measuring appropriateness of media for a v ariety of organizational communication activities and then compares se ven media across six organizational sites. The ranking of media were f ace-to-face, telephone, meetings, desktop video and videoconferencing, voice mail, text, and electronic mail. Although information exchange and socioemotional relations dimensions emerged, the first provided a parsimonious solution. Multidimensional scaling placed traditional med ia in separate clusters, and new media together with some instances of text and phone, along interpersonal-mediated and synchronous-asynchro nous axes. The appropriateness of face-to-fare and meetings did not ch ange over time, whereas ratings of phone and text (to some extent) and new media did. Appropriateness of new media was weakly associated wit h use. Finally, there was very little evidence of social information p rocessing influence on appropriateness, except for organizational newc omers' ratings of the newest medium, desktop video.