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A Closer Look at Multimediation

with Dr. Andrea Baker and Dr. Bryan Alexander

from:

Meeting on the Edge: Building the Virtual Meeting Place, by Bernard DeKoven

Copyright © 2001, Bernard DeKoven, all rights reserved

Introduction

1 Howard Rheingold,[1] author of The Virtual Community, is also the host of the Brainstorms community, which like the Well, is an online discussion group where participants post and exchange thoughts on many different topics of interest to its members.[2] In January 2000, Howard agreed to open a new virtual conference which from January until June, was devoted to a discussion of what we eventually called “multimediation” or “computer multimediated communication” (CMMC). Although more than 20 people signed up to participate in the virtual dialogue, eventually three people—Andrea Baker,[3] Bryan Alexander,[4] and myself—emerged as primary discussants. Because Bryan and Andrea accepted my invitation to collaborate early on, made time for meetings, and seemed to "click" in their interest in the topic and communications, we three did the majority of the thinking and writing.

2 The goal of our dialogue was to explore and define the relationships between computer-supported communication media and the impact of various combinations of media on the nature and effectiveness of collaborative work.

3 Our final product was developed in three sections. The first focused on a description of the unique characteristics of each of the nine media we explored (chat, conferencing, email andlistservs, instant messaging, MUDs and MOOs,  videoconferencing, electronic whiteboards, telephone, and face-to-face interaction). The next developed into a list of observations about the relationships between media. The final section summarized our findings about the nature and process of multimediation.

4 All our output was in list form. List-making is one of the most natural activities for collaboratiing groups, allowing for individual contributions and divergent thinking without forcing compromise. This also allows me, as author of this eMatter, to easily add my own comments and reflections after each list without violating the spirit or product of our collaboration.[5]

Characteristics of Media Used in Support of Dialogue[6]

Media explored

• 5 Chat
• 6 Conferencing
• 7 Email and email lists
• 8 Face-to-face interaction
• 9 Instant messaging
• 10 MUDs/MOOs
• 11 Telephone
• 12 Whiteboard
• 13 Videoconferencing

Definitions of Terms

• 14 Backchannel: The use of secondary media, often on a one-to-one basis, for conversations about communication taking place in a primary medium
• 15 CMMC: computer multimediated communication
• 16 Drift: the tendency for a conversation to go off-topic
• 17 MUD: multiuser dungeon
• 18 MOO: object-oriented MUD

Characteristics of Communication Media

Chat (see also MUDs and MOOs)

• 19 Chat is synchronous. It takes place in “near real time.”
• 20 It is difficult to keep a chat conversation focused.
• 21 Chat is informal.
• 22 The faster you are at thinking and typing, the more effective your participation.
• 23 Chat is cheap or free.
• 24 When more than two people are participating in a chat, it’s difficult for them to build on each other’s contributions and impossible to edit material already posted.
• 25 Chat is one-to-n (i.e., one-to-one or one-to-many, with no limit on the number of participants beyond two).
• 26 Chat can be one-to-one and one-to-many (two people can arrange to chat privately while also participating in a public chat).
• 27 You don’t have to reveal your true identity to participate in a chat.
• 28 Continuing a conversation in a chat is optional.
• 29 Because it is difficult to stay on topic, chat promotes off-topic or divergent conversation.
• 30 Participants often describe their chat rooms as physical spaces.
• 31 There is a difference between chat programs that display only finished postings (IRC) and those that show each person's typing as it happens. The former allow for more editorial control on the part of the individual participant. The latter encourage more immediate, intimate, and spontaneous conversations.
• 32 Chat is a well-established Internet technology. The Net abounds with chat tools and services, most of which are free. In multimediated meetings, chat provides us with an additional channel (backchannel) for private dialogue between co-facilitators. We can be on both the phone and the Net, using real-time Web conferencing to help our clients develop a shared vision while we coordinate our facilitation efforts via chat. Clients can also make use of the same capability, dialoguing with each other privately as needed while participating verbally (via phone) in the group effort.

Email

• 33 Email is asynchronous, text-focused, linear communication that often results in “threads” of related messages.
• 34 Email is recursive: It's very easy to include material from previous email in a reply.
• 35 Email is cheaper than all other electronic media.
• 36 Incoming messages are heterogeneous, varying in content and origin, and require some ordering mechanism.
• 37 Email can be saved or deleted. Saved email becomes “permanent” in that it can be retrieved and reissued. The individual control of permanence varies, depending on access to the server. Even when an individual deletes an item, it may remain on the server.
• 38 Through email we can send and receive materially dangerous attachments (viruses). This increases the intensity of trust issues around the medium while adding to the technological requirements of learning and using email.
• 39 Personal email lists allow flexible group formation.
• 40 Email cannot be recalled; once it is sent, the creative act and control are over.
• 41 Email doesn't require immediate user attention.
• 42 Email is either one-to-one or one-to-many, where the user can select recipients.
• 43 Email can be CCed to multiple recipients.
• 44 There are issues around how many recipients are on the CC list, and concerns about being "left out of the loop."
• 45 Email can easily be inadvertently distributed.
• 46 Informal email groups can be spawned by repeated CCed correspondence.
• 47 Email tends to be stylistically informal.
• 48 Users can manage certain aspects of messages: identity (both name and number of accounts), sequence, allowed reception (through filters), storage (by folders), and selected recipient lists.
• 49 As with the telephone, we cannot afford to turn off email since essential information will arrive thereby. Consequently, unwanted email is unusually offensive, and sorting incoming email is especially important.
• 50 Accumulated email requires maintenance, more so than any other medium.
• 51 An email conversation (not a listserv) never ends; it stops when the discussion does.
• 52 Email conversations have no clear and essential establishing moment; they are free to diverge and to change tone and topic.

  53 Email provides us with an excellent vehicle for distributing the results of a meeting even before the meeting is over. It is the virtual world’s answer to hard copy. When performing Technography in face-to-face meetings, we frequently take “copy breaks.” While everyone is milling about attending to social and biological necessities, we print, collate, and distribute copies of the products of the previous dialogue. When participants return from the break, they take a few minutes to review, comment on, and approve their work. We incorporate their changes “live” and proceed to the next task, confident that everyone is on the same page—a page that they’ve written, read, and agreed to. Email provides us with the same opportunity, and we don’t have to sacrifice any trees in the process!

Email listservs

• 54 Email lists are intended for global communication (i.e., messages potentially useful to every member of the group). However, in practice, email lists mingle person-to-person and broadcast (or entire group) communication, sometimes accidentally.
• 55 Personal email lists allow individuals to form and reform their own groups.
• 56 Users have to “unsubscribe” in order to end their participation in an email list.
• 57 Different users have different levels of authority over an email list as moderators, list owners, or participants.
• 58 The dialogue generated through email lists, although archived on the Web, is pursued independently of its Web presence, and its members are consequently free to pursue whatever theme or focus reflects the current interests of the contributors.
• 59 As with all email, listservs tend to generate cross-topical drift. Drift can be controlled by a listserv moderator via postings to the list or backchannel dialogue with individual members.
• 60 Personal email lists tend not to have rolling conversation. They are therefore also less likely to undergo topical drift.
• 61 Personal email lists are more likely to encourage person-to-person communication than listservs.
• 62 Writing to an email list is a form of publication, given the established audience and the possibility of creating and publishing archives of email correspondence.
• 63 Although silence on an email list indicates a temporary loss of energetic conversation, it does not effectively prohibit further conversation. Users perceive silence as an exhaustion of a given topic, but not of the list itself.
• 64 Very long posts to an email list tend to create a new conversational thread. Such posts can also block the progress of a current discussion.

  65 Email listservs are the best of all current “push” technologies. Even though we make it a practice to publish the results of a meeting on the Web, listserv technology is the best tool we have for making sure everyone knows that the results have been published and where to find them.

Instant messaging (IM)

• 66 Instant messaging is person-to-person (i.e., always one-to-one) rather than broadcast.
• 67 Instant messaging is less likely than email to be scrutinized by institutional authority.
• 68 Instant messaging is intrusive and interrupting.
• 69 Instant messaging allows users to select who can interrupt and when.
• 70 Instant messaging requires intensive user attention.
• 71 Instant messaging implies a quicker turnaround time for reading and responding to communication.
• 72 Instant messaging is less reliable than email or phone.
• 73 Instant messaging is not really instant.
• 74 Instant messaging is not very permanent, although some servers keep a brief “history.”
• 75 Without a history function, incoming messages have no context.
• 76 Instant messaging has no necessary beginning or end. Tone and topic can shift easily.
• 77 Instant messaging allows drift but, given the narrow social focus, is easily controllable by the participants.
• 78 Instant messaging can run in parallel with other applications

  79 Instant messaging is the Web equivalent of a text pager. Like chat, it serves as a powerful backchannel so that co-facilitators can exchange private messages during meetings. Each message is treated as a unique “event” by the instant messaging software and is usually accompanied by a sound alert. This gives us a kind of emergency notification system. Because we are usually so preoccupied attending to all our other multiple media, instant messaging often proves to be a critical tool for reaching each other on demand. Unlike chat, it doesn’t require Web access, so there’s one less window for us to have to keep open.

MUDs/MOOs

• 80 Users spend significant energy on establishing a character.
• 81 While in many online media we assume that the people we interact with are, in fact, who they say they are, we can assume that those in MUDs and MOOs are not who they represent themselves to be.
• 82 MUDs/MOOs allow the creation of virtual places and objects with distinctive behaviors and attributes.

  83 For people who have played online adventure games, MUDs and MOOs are very powerful chat environments. Because users can develop their own persona, or even multiple personas, they can explore a wide variety of relationships and behaviors without fear of recrimination or retribution. For a virtual team, such graphical chat environments can allow people to meet outside of any hierarchy and exchange information and opinions they would normally conceal. A variety of virtual rooms can be devoted to specific tasks and projects and filled with artifacts like documents and hyperlinks. Unfortunately, for people not familiar with these environments, there is a lot of learning to do, with many arcane commands that must be mastered in order to navigate and communicate.

Conferencing (including message boards, forums, and bulletin boards)

• 84 Conferencing is more permanent than most other electronic media. Host and moderators, however, exercise some control over the degree of permanence.
• 85 The ability to edit your own posts allows greater control over writing and reduces performance anxiety. However, conferences usually develop technical and/or social norms that prohibit further editing after a significant period of time.
• 86 Conferencing tends to require a fixed or established personal identity.
• 87 You can read and write to a conference selectively. Your participation reflects your interests.
• 88 Conference participation requires active maintenance (keeping track of items, following discussions, joining or leaving threads) in order to manage the complex flood of communication.
• 89 Conferencing automatically generates explicit and accessible conversation histories.
• 90 The first post on an item has strong defining power over the subsequent conversation. It shapes initial tone and topic while differentiating the item from others. Users can also direct others to the initial post to redefine the current conversation in response to perceived topical or tonal drift.
• 91 The last post on an item has unusually strong shaping power over the tone and topic of the current conversation.
• 92 An organizer can cut off discussion on an item by blocking selected users' access, disabling all new conversation, or deleting the entire item.
• 93 Different users have different levels of control over content: editorial, ownership, blocking permission, or disallowing content.
• 94 Depending on initial and subsequent posts, participants, and topics, conferences and items have different characteristics, tending toward a different identity or culture for each. Cross-fertilization can occur intentionally or accidentally.
• 95 Topical drift (divergence) in conferences is fairly easy to control, given the authorial powers of moderators and item hosts as well as the formal reinforcements (visible item titles, for example).
• 96 Writing to a conference is a form of publishing, given the established audience and independent maintenance of conference communication. This may be limited by an individual's ownership of an item. Conference publishing occurs in two stages: the first with some user control (where the material is still editable by the user), the second without.
• 97 Silence on a conference item or topic can forestall further responses, which becomes a self-perpetuating process. Silence implies that the community no longer supports that discussion or has simply lost interest.
• 98 Very long posts force a conversation into a choice: whether to focus on detailed responses to that text, create a new discussion elsewhere centered on that text, or bypass it and return to the previous conversation.

  99 Conferencing technology is the principal medium for the development and pursuit of what is called “virtual community.” Because a single conference can contain such a wide variety of different conversations, individuals can easily find topics of personal interest and people who share that interest. is an example of a conferencing technology dedicated to the business environment.

  100 As an adjunct to real-time virtual meetings, conferencing makes it possible for a virtual team to continue its collaboration between meetings. Meeting products can be posted for review, action items and specific initiatives can each spawn their own conferences, dialogue can be maintained, products for the next meeting can be developed, subteams can be formed to continue the pursuit of objectives developed during the meeting. In other words, conferencing provides the virtual team with the continuity needed to create a complete meeting system.[7]

Videoconferencing (Web-based and satellite-based)

• 101 Videoconferencing requires dedicated technology and a high degree of compatibility.
• 102 Videoconferencing can potentially add a level of humanization to dialogue and reduce conversational abuse.
• 103 Potentially, videoconferencing can make conversation more attractive.
• 104 Videoconferencing can be used to display and discuss static and dynamic objects.
• 105 Videoconferencing can be intrusive for people who prefer partial or total anonymity.

  106 Currently, effective videoconferencing requires a higher bandwidth than can be easily accessed through the Internet. Web-based videoconferencing produces what appears to be a series of stills rather than a sense of virtual presence. Dedicated videoconference facilities provide a sense of real-time presence but do not necessarily make the dialogue more productive. Videoconferencing is generally resorted to more for political/organizational purposes than for collaborative work.

  107 When the cameras are turned away from “talking heads” and toward the objects of conversation, videoconferencing becomes a much more attractive and practical tool for collaborating groups. If, for example, we are working on modifying a widget, it can be very useful to show the widget itself. Even in this scenario, videoconferencing does not necessarily augment the productivity of the group or the efficiency of the conversation. To make videoconferencing a genuinely productive platform for collaboration, it needs to be combined with other electronic media, like dataconferencing,[8] email, instant messaging, etc.

Electronic whiteboard

• 108 Some electronic whiteboards let you save images in bitmap form.
• 109 Electronic whiteboard technology lets you broadcast a graphic while the graphic is being constructed.
• 110 Electronic whiteboards can accept input from all participants more or less simultaneously. In order for the whiteboard to succeed as a collaborative tool, all participants need to agree on ground rules for image creation and manipulation.
• 111 Electronic whiteboards don't work well as stand-alone medium. They usually require at least one supplementary medium.
• 112 Permanence of work is optional, at the discretion of the user (determined partly by server configuration, partly by application).

  113 Electronic whiteboards can be found as standard features of most Web conferencing services. They are distributed freely throughout the Internet.[9] Recently, technologies have evolved to connect the conference room whiteboard to the PC and the Internet, greatly extending the practicality and effectiveness of this medium.[10]

  114 If properly structured and facilitated, collaborative whiteboarding (“CoBoarding”[11]) can provide a meaningful environment in support of virtual team training and decision-making.

Telephone

• 115 Receiving a phone call is one of the most interruptive communicative acts in multimediation, after face-to-face interaction. However, the emergence of voice mail, caller ID, and answering machines as widely used screens mitigates the intrusive quality.
• 116 It is socially more difficult to interrupt a person using the phone than with any other medium.
• 117 The telephone is the most physically intimate medium, unless a speakerphone is used. A telephone needs to be placed directly against the ears and near the mouth.
• 118 Telephone communication is intrinsically context-rich, in that it offers a wider variety of cues than most other media (with the possible exception of videoconferencing). Users are more likely to infer characteristics of other users over the phone than by other media.
• 119 During a phone conversation, the verbal responses from other users are very synchronous. One result is rapid (almost immediate) feedback. A second result is a disinclination to longer arguments. A third is a greater awareness of the “presence” of other users.
• 120 Due to a combination of factors (a greater sense of how we are heard, a lifetime of use, increased physical intimacy), users tend to think of telephones and phone conversation as safe spaces.
• 121 Users can develop a phone voice, or a phone persona, in some ways distinct from their “real life” identity.
• 122 Telephone usage requires little technological sophistication.
• 123 For phone conferencing, the greater the number of users, the greater the need for facilitation.
• 124 Given the widespread availability of cell and mobile phones, users frequently select the telephone in order to communicate while simultaneously being engaged in other activities in the physical and/or online worlds.
• 125 Telephone messages are well-suited for emotional and contextual communication but less efficient for communicating detailed or complex information, such as directions, raw data, collaborative documents, etc.
• 126 Hanging up without clearly bringing the conversation to a conclusion is a strong message, a dramatic gesture of breaking communication.
• 127 Compared with the personal and intimate nature of telephone conversations, all other media are felt as relatively public.
• 128 The telephone has consistently proven to be an irreplaceable tool for facilitating real-time virtual collaboration. Facilitating a telephone conference call is definitely a special skill and is every bit as complex as facilitating a face-to-face encounter. Combined with dataconferencing, the telephone provides an important bridge to the personal and emotional sides of communication, while the dataconference serves to build and maintain the intellectual focus.

  129 Voice over IP (VoIP) is still an emerging technology. Using an Internet-based phone is much like using a citizens band radio. Only one person can talk at a time, and you have to wait until she’s finished before you can say anything . When dealing with sensitive issues or when working collaboratively with a group larger than two, the telephone is still by far the preferred medium.

Face-to-face interaction

• 130 The more participants involved, the more likely it is that they will need facilitation.
• 131 Generally, face-to-face conversations are synchronous. However, when a group breaks down into subgroups, activity within the subgroups is later communicated to other subgroups asynchronously.
• 132 Face-to-face conversations are usually ephemeral, unless members of a group agree to continually repeat or paraphrase the main points of the dialogue.
• 133 Although we can edit our conversation only as we speak, we sometimes try to edit (influence) how others characterize our comments.
• 134 We accomplish backchannel communication during a face-to-face meeting by relying on other media (notes, memos) or by breaking up into smaller groups.
• 135 Face-to-face dialogue is not very recursive unless other media are used (blackboards, notes) or participants have a strong memory.
• 136 The more hierarchical the organization that sponsors the face-to-face meeting, the less likely it is that participants will openly express their feelings about the communication.
• 137 Face-to-face meetings potentially create the most context-rich medium and require the least technological sophistication.
• 138 Face-to-face conversations are especially prone to drift, given the high number of cues and levels of interpretation in an information-rich environment (facial expressions, gestures, body language, odors, architecture, etc.).
• 139 Due to the rich context, face-to-face meetings may be more easily hampered by stereotyping and miscommunication across cultures.

  140 Face-to-face meetings are our best medium for the pursuit of social, political, and organizational goals. When establishing trust, alignment, or a sense of belonging, when providing recognition or reprimand, nothing is as powerful as a face-to-face meeting. On the other hand, if the purpose of the meeting is to create deliverables, skillful facilitation is required.

  141 There are dedicated meeting environments that effectively combine face-to-face interaction with multimediated communication.[12] These also require facilitation.

Multimediating: Selecting and Moving between Media

Virtual Teamwork

• 142 Our effectiveness as virtual collaborators begins with our media repertoire. The more communication media we have available, the more likely it is that we will select the medium or combination of media that will maximize the effectiveness of our collaboration. Conversely, the less familiar we are with a range of media, the more likely it is that our communication efforts will become characterized by miscommunication and misinterpretation.
• 143 The virtual teamworker functions outside any given system of communication packages, combining media and moving from medium to medium according to the changing needs of task and team. In so doing, the virtual teamworker becomes a multimediator.
• 144 Multimediation requires a set of minimum conditions: shared access to essential hardware and applications, skills competency with the media, and contact data for all involved.
• 145 A certain level of technical literacy and comfort is necessary.
• 146 Inertia plays a key role in an individual’s decision to post to a medium. The more often you post to a given medium, , the easier it becomes to continue to do so. If you use a medium less, the the decision to post becomes more difficult and the  barriers to communication become higher.
• 147 Users may select a medium depending on the degree to which it is perceived as a publication. They might choose instant messaging or personal email to avoid publishing their communication, or they might select conferences to establish that they’re writing for an audience.

The Virtual Community

• 148 Any multimediation is improved by established closure rules or rituals.
• 149 As a communicating group develops over time, members begin to identify the use of certain media as indicative of more or less formal messages.
• 150 As the number of media shared between parties increases, the trust builds and the sense of intimacy and understanding is increased. Corollary: The greater the number of media we use to communicate with each other, the larger our sense of individual biography. This is independent of the temporal nature of each medium.
• 151 Each medium lends itself to the development of a different perception of other users, so the use of multiple mediaproduces a richer, overlapping image of other people.
• 152 When exchanging personally sensitive information where sufficient trust has not yet been established, the selection of media can positively or negatively affect the participants’ willingness to disclose.
• 153 A frequently used medium, such as email, can be used to direct people to a less frequently checked, but community-essential, medium such as a discussion board.
• 154 Emoticons[13 are used to add context to plain text in written e-communication.
• 155 Emoticons and Internet-specific acronyms can be found in all written e-media.
• 156 Complementing online text-based communication with visual images of the correspondents helps ground collaboration, accelerating mutual understanding. However, this process risks triggering various cultural biases and reactions to personal appearance.
• 157 In every medium, there are norms about turn-taking, lengths of messages, and formality of style. People who are insensitive to these norms disrupt the flow of discourse.
• 158 Inertia plays a key role in virtual community membership. Increased frequency of communication encourages further discussion via a medium; decreased communication frequency tends to discourage further conversation. Persistence is therefore a critical trait for those desiring to establish successful virtual teams.
• 159 Many media allow a form of person-to-person communication (backchannel or side conversation) within the confines of a larger community (such as an email listserv, group chat, or conference). This allows users to vent frustrations, discuss potential problems, or conduct personal business without disturbing the larger group. It is easier to do this online since such private communication is less intrusive electronically than in face-to-face dialogue.
• 160 Reliance on one medium often produces reliance on another medium as a backchannel for relatively informal communication.
• 161 Multimediation is open to play, and that play is functional, instrumental, rewarding, creative, and a good strategy for getting tasks developed and accomplished. Play is often a preferred mode of interaction when exploring a new environment where people don't yet know how to use the tools to achieve their ends.
• 162 Users tend to choose a medium suited to their perception of their communication's sensitivity.
• 163 Shifting discussion to another medium often aids in defusing and solving conflicts; remaining within the medium where the misunderstanding originated often exacerbates the problem.
• 164 Technological skill, to a degree, determines the richness and flexibility of self-presentation on all media. Similarly, such skill can build social status in a virtual community or team.
• 165 Users are likely to choose a medium that reflects their work style. For example, more spontaneous communicators will often select chat, while more deliberate thinkers will choose email.
• 166 Users can expand the number of media they use in communication in order to expand their notion of another's identity.
• 167 Users can select or change media based on their perceptions of how each medium structures their conversation.
• 168 Users select media partly in terms of expected response time from other users. Media can be ranked according to time horizon as follows, from quickest to slowest: face-to-face interaction, telephone, chat, IM, email, conferencing, Web page.
• 169 Online communication complements and can extend non-electronic communication and socialization, and vice versa.
• 170 Our individual ability to control different media shapes which media we choose, when we use them, and how intensely we rely on them.
• 171 Whatever the medium used, people respond and develop when given attention and recognition. This is a non-technological aspect of communication that we should include in our understanding of any communication technology and/or practice.

Moving between media

• 172 Multimediation allows for multitasking.
• 173 It is difficult to adopt a new medium or blend of media, even when we really like the inherent possibilities.
• 174 If users are working on producing a final and formal product, they will tend to choose more permanent media. If users are seeking informal communication, they will tend toward less permanent media.
• 175 Online communication is often more suited to collaboration than traditional meetings.
• 176 Topical drift tends to occur in all media when there is a lack of reinforcement for the current topic.
• 177 Drift is intrusive only among three or more parties.
• 178 Given the tendencies of different media to allow different amounts of topical drift, users may choose or move between media depending on their desires to encourage or discourage result-oriented dialogue.
• 179 The perceived amount of information to be shared or developed determines which medium or combination of media is best suited for sending and receiving the material.
• 180 Perceptions of facilitation quality can drive users toward or away from individual media sites.
• 181 To compensate for technical flaws or failures in one medium, users can move to other media.
• 182 The desired level of permanence helps determine the choice of medium. If users are working on producing a final and formal product, they will tend to choose more permanent media: paper documents, .pdf files, Web pages, archived email lists, conferences, etc. If users are seeking informal communication, they will tend toward less permanent media: chat, telephone, face-to-face interaction, instant messaging, or email.
• 183  There is a difference in the experience of multimediation between a group discovering, choosing, and exploring media on its own and a group using a multimediation package (such as those provided through PlaceWare and Microsoft’s NetMeeting). While packages can offer users media applications that are too weak to stand on their own (such as whiteboards or electronic polling), they tend to discourage the integration of external media. As of this writing, software and online services are tending toward incorporating an increasing number of integrated multimedia functions.
• 184 Users will tend to choose a medium based on their familiarity with the technology, shifting media as their familiarity grows.

Summary

185 Intention matters at least as much as technology. There's a strong relationship between a multimediated group's purpose and the media it employs.

186 Effective virtual teamworking balances "personal," or socially oriented, and "purposeful," or task-directed, styles and media. The more exploratory or original the task, the stronger the reliance on effective, playful, personal communication.

187 There's a need for a fluency in switching between these two modes (personal and purposeful), and problems arise when groups split on their preferred emphasis of mode. This is a media-influenced issue where different media shape the problem in different ways. For example, when the telephone is used, personal communication seems to be especially necessary at the start of the conversation. In contrast, group email often limits itself to formal, task-centered exchanges. Preliminary use of other media for personal communication can set the stage for working directly on formal tasks and progressing toward group goals.

188 The more effective the personal communication, the more likely it is that the task component will emerge naturally and that task-related communication will be effectively pursued. Also, playfulness may well have a role in bringing compromise and closure to tasks in both face-to-face and multimediated dialogue.

189 Virtual teamworking is a dynamic, evolving process that changes as goals emerge over time. New goals tend to be generated in response to specific accomplishments. The selection of media can encourage more productive or more process-oriented dialogue. For example, switching from chat and email to a Technographed session tends to move the dialogue more toward product. Furthermore, as team members develop skills, learn new technologies, and shift assignments, their selection of media shifts. Finally, as groups work over time, they develop habits in and associations with each medium, which must be taken into account when selecting media. Positive or negative reactions and experiences may reinforce established routines as well as encourage experimentation with media. These particular group patterns must be taken into account when selecting media and suggesting new ways of using them.

190 Multimediation opens up an alternative and constructive space for collaborative communication. People are flocking to the Web to do collaborative work that's easily possible in real life because real-life politics can grow so intense as to dampen constructive work. Many perceive online interactions as an alternative to such politics-laden work. In real life, we tend to meet in unequal groups; representatives of different levels of the hierarchy (boss, secretaries, employees) are almost always present. This makes the political agendas preeminent. Online, we have easier access to same-level groups and can pursue the task more directly. Put another way, cyberspace is often a more task-oriented, less political space. Political tensions can be further softened or downplayed by the use of a persona or an anonymous communication.

191 Also, some types of multimediated conversations take place at different times (asynchronously), making it easier for each person’s contribution to be prepared and viewed (as with email). Even using synchronous or nearly synchronous media such as instant messages, chat, or phone, participants can still focus their attention more easily on the exchange of ideas and information, avoiding issues raised by personal appearance or status cues.

192 Exploring new communication technologies is easily equated with “playing around.” By placing the technologies used in multimediated conversations in this framework, we are able to offset anxieties about the effectiveness of this activity in responding to the task. The nature of technology is such that many of the most empowering and advanced collaboration technologies will never be totally reliable. Consequently, people who come to rely on such technologies must do so with a certain sense of playfulness – a willingness to accept technical failures and interruptions “for the sake of the game.” In all cases, a basic level of familiarity with the Internet and the mechanics of using computer input devices is a prerequisite.

193 A multimediated group can supplement its work on a major task or project by engaging in one-to-one or one-to-some communication. Employing these modes of smaller, supplementary communication in related media is sometimes known as "backchanneling." Care is needed to make sure that group members accept some amount of splitting into subgroups and that they are comfortable with the process. These parallel conversations allow for informal dialogue, activities that require the gathering of more detail, editing processes that would be clumsy in a large group, clarification and exploration of sensitive issues, and personal communication.

194 Effective virtual teamworking requires the development of new roles. For example, emergent group leadership roles include moderator, co-facilitator, Cybrarian, and Technographer. The moderator acts as gatekeeper, based on partial ownership of all communication within their medium. The co-facilitator works with others to elicit and ensure participation. The Cybrarian maintains continuity between posts and acts as a gatekeeper for outside information. And the Technographer assists the group in creating its products.