A proposal for unifying the media richness and the social influence in media selection field

As the computer-mediated communication was gradually becoming the mainstream in office works, people had to face the problem of choosing right communication media from numerous cheap and powerful candidate tools that were similar in functions. At the same time, designers of communication tools tried to add more new technologies into their products to struggle for more market share. But how did users choose communication media? Were their selections socially or rationally decided? The answers relied on an integrated understanding of the communication and media selection process. Unfortunately, existing theories on media selection could only provide incomplete answer for the problem. In the light of this, an information transfer model based on information richness was proposed to provide general explanations for media selections. The model attempted to merge media richness theories and social influence theories into one dynamic descriptive frame. The model included five entities, i.e. the information source, the perceived information, the communication media, the encoder, and the decoder. Two major processes, i.e. information encoding and decoding, were proposed to assist the analyses of information transfer and answer how media selection decision was made. A mutually shared information layer was identified as the foundation for effective communication. Furthermore, the shared layer was regarded as the basis for lean media to transfer rich information. Moreover, less richness distortion during information transfer was argued to be the key for media selection. Finally, the media selection was suggested to be an evolving process than static decision.