Why do users communicate via such or such media? Some insights from users’ daily experiences Françoise Détienne1

Béatrice Cahour1

1

LTCI, CNRS - Telecom ParisTech 46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris, France [email protected] ABSTRACT

The objective of this study is to understand why people choose to use such or such media of communication in their daily activity. In a field study, twelve young adults were requested to narrate daily communication experiences on a storyboard, some of them being interviewed afterward. Quantitative results show a significant relationship between the choice of media and the affective or socio-relational link with the recipient. Qualitative analyses highlight (1) more or less deliberate choices of media, (2) strategic choices of media for emotional interactions or for reinforcing social relationships, (3) management of communication focus, (4) management of information complexity and ambiguity, (5) management of interruptiveness and modeling interlocutors’ availability and preference, (6) management of time-distributed communication with conversational progress and context switches. These results are put into perspective in the framework of mediated communication theories. Author Keywords

Media affordances, users’ experience, communication, socio-affective relationship.

mediated

ACM Classification Keywords

H5.2.: Ergonomics; H5.3.: asynchronous interaction; synchronous interaction; H5.m.: Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION

The objective of this study is to understand why people choose to use such or such media of communication (audio - phone or cell phone-, visioconference, chat, email, SMS, social media...) in their daily activity. Our aim is to understand the various dimensions (socio-relational, affective, contextual, content-related) of naturalistic situations which are relevant for this selection, deliberate or Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. NordiCHI 2010, October 16–20, 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland. Copyright 2010 ACM ISBN: 978-1-60558-934-3...$5.00.

Liv Lefebvre1,2 2

Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs Villarceaux - route de Villejust 91 620 NOZAY, France not. A field study has been conducted to collect and analyse daily lived experiences of communication. After a short presentation of our theoretical framework, we report on our methodology and develop our quantitative and qualitative results. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

The fundamental goal of mediated communication theories has been to explain the relationship between the affordances of different mediated technologies – e.g. interactivity, visibility, audibility, reviewability, revisability - and the communication that results from using those technologies. While some theories (e.g. [1]) propose more complex sets of affordances, Whittaker [5] suggests that modality and interactivity are most important. One major technology affordance is the different modes that technologies support: linguistic and visual modes. Visual modes are assumed to provide non-verbal information, e.g. facial expressions, important for the transmission of social and affective information. The second major affordance is interactivity. It supports bidirectional communication, allowing participants to provide immediate feedback to speakers about whether their communication has been understood or accepted. Mediated communication research has employed a variety of methods: laboratory studies, field trials, interviews, surveys, and ethnographic techniques. Most laboratory studies are comparative (for a review see [5]), and aim to explain how these different affordances produce differences between mediated and face to face communication in process, content or outcome of communication. Ethnographic studies (e.g. [2; 3]) document naturalistic situations but are often focused on the use of a single media, e.g. use of Instant Messaging [3]. They highlight forms of communication referred as «connected mode » or « communication zone » in which intimate interlocutors keep contact over long period of time via sometimes content-free signs of connected presence. Few studies have been conducted on users’ experiences about the choice between various medias in naturalistic situations and their subjective viewpoint on media affordances. Some studies [4] rely only on users’ selfdeclaration on media choices based on proposed scenarios in work situation. The originality of our study is (1) to rely on user experiences on the basis of self-reported stories of

communication via a storyboard; (2) to cover situated experiences which cross the various daily situations (work, home, mobility) as well as the use of various medias ; (3) to document more or less deliberate choices of media and users’ knowledge on media affordances which might motivate these choices.

media. Seventeen events are “complex” as they require several (two or three) communication medias. If we decompose complex events into simple ones, we have a total of seventy-two simple communication events using the following medias: e-mail (26 events), audio by mobile phone (15), SMS (14), audio by phone (8), chat (7), visioconference (1), social media (1).

METHODOLOGY Storyboard “the diary of my communications”

As it was too intrusive and difficult to videotape users in their daily activity (at work, at home, in mobility) we asked users to describe, via a storyboard, contextualised cases of communication related to user experiences in mediated interactions. A paper storyboard entitled “the diary of my communications” had to be completed by users. For each communication story in the storyboard, the users had to answer an open question: “tell about a communication event (or several of them) that you experienced during this day”. After this narrative description, they were requested to answer some questions (if not answered yet in the narration itself) documenting: (1) the socio-relational link with the interlocutor(s): private, professional, public (or other) spheres; (2) the degree of intimacy with the interlocutor(s): freely described and ranked on a likert scale; (3) the frequency of contact with the interlocutor(s); (4) the communication media(s) and device(s) used: e.g. email by mobile phone; (5) the eventual reasons for choosing this particular media and/or device; (6) the history (before/during/after communication) and the content of the communication; (7) the emotional state during the communication event of the interviewee and of his/her interlocutors(s); (8) the context of the communication: e.g., alone or not, at home. At the end of each day, they were requested to quantify their daily communications according to each media used. After a week or two, each diary was collected and interviews were conducted to complete the information given in the diaries. Population and collected data

Sixteen young adults (22-31 year old), highly educated (master level), were requested to narrate daily communication experiences on the paper storyboard. Whereas sixteen storyboards have been delivered, only twelve have been completed (by seven females and five males) and collected back. These users were mostly academics (9/3). They all lived in Paris, either alone (7), or not (3 in a couple and 2 with roommates). Five of the users (three females and two males, chosen for their availability) were interviewed on the basis of their storyboard to help them recover a vivid memory of the events and complete their description. Fifty communication events have been collected. All of them describe communication with one or several interlocutors. Thirty three events have been qualified as “simple” in so far as they required only one communication

Methods of analysis

Descriptive statistical analyses have been conducted on the basis of simple communication events. Each event has been characterized by the media used and by the following descriptors: socio-relational link, intimacy link, context (work/home; alone/not alone), objective of communication (e.g. giving an appointment), cost of communication (urgency, money). Qualitative analyses have been conducted on the basis of the collected events to have a more holistic view of how the various elements of the context intervene in specific choices of media . RESULTS Quantitative analyses - a significant effect of sociorelational and affective links on the choice of media

The collected communication events show a frequent use of quite “classical” communication media, with dominant use of email, and very marginal use of social media (facebook) and visio-conferencing which might be surprising for this young population. We checked that this distribution reflected their daily use of various media as quantified by the users themselves in the storyboard. Our statistical analyses show a significant effect of the socio-relational and affective links on the choice of media. Other statistical analyses are not significant. Quantitative results show that the type of media which is used to communicate with the others depends on the social sphere (X2(4;72)=12.06; p