Examining the Effectiveness of Electronic Group Communication Technologies: The Role of the Conversation Interface

Recently, a growing body of empirical research has begun to examine the practice of electronic group communication. Electronic group communication is a key process through which people can maintain communities of practice and leverage the strength of weak ties. Even though prior empirical investigations of electronic group communication have been successful at providing evidence for its effectiveness, these prior studies have not adequately dealt with the differences in the types of technology implementations of electronic group communication. We argue that different social and technical designs of electronic group communication technologies will influence various aspects of electronic group communication, such as level of participation, patterns of interaction and genres of communicative purposes. We propose and define the notion of conversation interface to be an important factor in electronic group communications. This paper illustrates the characteristics of the conversation interface and derives propositions concerning the impacts of conversation interface on electronic group communication based on prior theory. We also conduct an exploratory investigation of actual electronic group communication technologies to highlight the importance of the conversation interface factor. The paper concludes with discussions and directions for future research on electronic group communications.