Mutual Knowledge and Communicative Effectiveness

Abstract

This chapter examines voice mail use in several divisions of a nationwide insurance company. Voice mail (VM) is a computer-aided telephone system capable of storing and forwarding digitized spoken messages. Users report that voice mail was useful for time-delayed communication and for retaining affect in delayed communication. Social presence is the degree to which a communication medium conveys the actual physical presence of the participants communicating. Channels high in social presence or information richness, such as face-to-face communication or video conferencing, can convey motion, distance, and paralinguistic cues, as well as denotative content. A large insurance organization in the process of pilot testing a voice mail system provided the setting for the study. VM can overcome situational constraints inherent in using the telephone, which not only requires both communicators to use the medium at the same time, but also generally involves the transformation of the communication content across several media.

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