Communication Media Usage

There are two different groups of people when it comes to media usage. The first group involve people who do not like the thought of using technology especially when it comes to something like trying to create a web page for their business. The second group of people are excited about the new technology that comes out. In the past it was a huge and exciting thing to have a flip phone. It was not until about the late 1990s that people started to use instant messaging.

The media richness model was proposed by Daft and Lengel in order to understand how individuals decide what type of communication media they would like to use. This model was created to study how people decide what communication technique is best used in a certain type of situation for example being face-to-face, phone, e-mail, etc. The four criteria to distinguish the information-carrying capacity of media was:

1. The availability of instant feedback
2. The use of multiple cues
3. The use of natural language
4. The personal focus of the medium.