Successful and unsuccessful multicommunication episodes: Engaging in dialogue or juggling messages?

Authors:
Jeanine Warisse Turner;N. Lamar Reinsch, Jr
Affiliations:
Communication, Culture, and Technology Program, Georgetown University, Washington, USA;The McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, Washington, USA
Venue:
Information Systems Frontiers
Year:
2010

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Abstract

This paper describes instances of multicommunicating--or engaging in more than one conversation at a time. It uses a critical incident technique to explore successful and unsuccessful incidents of multicommunicating from the perspective of 201 MBA students. Additionally, we asked which media individuals pair together when multicommunicating. We found very frequent pairing of the telephone (which provides partial compartmentalization but no flexibility of tempo) with electroric text (which provides both compartmentalization and flexibility of tempo). We also found that respondents provide a variety of reasons for labeling a particular episode as "unsuccessful." In many cases the person seemed to describe an episode as unsuccessful when the person or a communicating partner had exceeded his or her ability to juggle multiple conversations as demonstrated by communication errors.