Designing for the Participants

This article describes telecommunications, which encompasses the electromagnetic transmission of information, and then examines an important subunit: teleconferencing. Teleconferencing is viewed from the voice, print, and video perspectives and is compared by cost, bandwidth, and speed of feedback. Suggestions on how to prepare for teleconferencing sessions are presented, as are implications to industry, to students, and to teachers of business communication IT IS ONLY IN THE LAST FEW YEARS that phrases such as, &dquo;information society,&dquo; &dquo;information revolution,&dquo; and &dquo;telecommunications&dquo; have started to have real meaning; until recently these terms transmitted little beyond their obvious thrust for those outside the communication/ computer technology cluster. The bombardment of informationoriented advances that has moved into the awareness of society has created new depth of meaning for the concept of information. &dquo;Information&dquo; now elicits swirls of impressions that frequently include the pervasive home computers, the live international satellite transmissions on the evening television news, computers that &dquo;run&dquo; our cars, electronic banking and cash flow, record retrieval of all forms of personal information, and voice synthesizers that tell us, at the grocery store checkout, that we have just purchased, &dquo;Libby's green beans, 39 cents.&dquo; Many of the other articles in this special issue necessarily are concerned with the &dquo;old&dquo; concept of information and information theory-the one that for about three decades has examined the interplay of semantics, entropy, redundancy, and information systems. Indeed these and other related topics form the underpinning of our theoretical approaches to information. This article, however, does not focus on the theoretical aspects of telecommunication or teleconferencing but rather surveys their present and predicted status. Our approach here is more futuristic than historical, more descriptive than theory-related. The thrust of this article is toward telecommunications. However, since teleconferencing is so important to telecommunications, teleconferencing will be reviewed as well. -We first describe the differences between telecommunications and teleconferencing, then present a taxonomy of the dimensions of teleconferencing, and finally present telecommunications and teleconferencing-based implications to the intended audiences of this article: business communication students, faculty, and practitioners.

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Testing the Theory of Electronic Propinquity: Organizational Teleconferencing

Korzenny

Bauer

1981

Communication Research

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The present article reports an experiment conducted in order to test the recently formulated “Theory of Electronic Propinquity.” In the original study, the author proposed a structural-functional approach to mediated communication in which perceived propinquity was considered to be the essential system trait for the continuation of the human communication system in organizations. Psychological propinquity was considered to affect the degree to which members of an organization experience communication satisfaction. A 3 times 2 experiment was conducted where the treatments were three business conference situations (face-to-face, video. and audio only) with two different levels of complexity of information in a problem-solving task. The results of the equation for perceived propinquity indicated that only perceived feedback was a significant contributor. The results of the equation for communication satisfaction indicated that perceived feedback, perceived level of communication rules, and psychological propinquity were significant contributors. The major finding of the study, was the importance of perceived feedback in accounting for variance in communication satisfaction. Psychological propinquity, however, was found to mediate the impact of perceived feedback on the communication satisfaction of the participants. Finally, the shortcomings of the experiment were discussed as well as the implications of the study for future research and theory-building efforts.

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Designing for the Participants

Cited by 3 publications

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Telecommunications, Teleconferencing, and Business Communications

Testing the Theory of Electronic Propinquity: Organizational Teleconferencing

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