Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

Although there are definitely highly interactive components involved in WOW and people make lifelong
friends in WOW, WOW is a virtual world that has a specific end result focused on winning.
These different worlds have different purposes, but people can feel highly present in either or both.
When students who are not familiar with these virtual worlds enter them, they often have a hard time
understanding how people can spend hours upon hours interacting with others within these virtual
worlds. The students view this as a “strange” experience and experience no social presence at all.
Conversely, people who “live” in these virtual worlds regularly experience high levels of social presence.
We do know that those individuals who report higher levels of social presence tend to have more
rewarding online interpersonal interactions and are more likely to perceive themselves as competent
communicators within these mediated environments. 62
The third major theory that has been applied to CMC is media richness theory. Media richness theory
was first proposed by Richard L. Daft and Robert H. Lengel. 63 is defined as “the potential
information carrying capacity of data.” 64 In Lengel’s doctoral dissertation, he proposed that media varied
in richness depending on how much information is provided through the communication. 65 For example,
in print media, all we have is text. As such, we don’t have nonverbal behaviors of the author to help us
interpret the words we are reading. With FtF communication, on the other hand, we have the full realm
of nonverbal behaviors that we can attend to in an effort to understand the sender’s message. As such,
Lengel argued that media escalates in richness in the following order: computer output, formal memos,
personal memos, telephone conversations, and FtF interactions. You’ll notice that this analysis of media
was originally designed to help individuals understand the media choices organizational members have in
the workplace.
So, where does this leave us with CMC? Well, from the basic premise of media richness theory, we
can ascertain that the richer the media, the less ambiguous a message is for a receiver. 66
Up to this point, the first three theories we examined that have been used to explain why people use
CMC have all been theories originally designed to examine media before the proliferation of CMC.
The first truly unique theory designed to look at CMC from a communication perspective came from
Joseph Walther’s social information processing theory, in 1992. 67 As someone with a background in
communication, Walther realized that our impressions of those we interact with and our interpersonal
interactions with them change over time, yet the previous three theories applied to CMC didn’t take into
account how interpersonal relationships evolve as the interactants spend more time getting to know one
another. For example, both media richness theory and social presence theory focus on the nonverbal
aspects of CMC and assume that because of the lack of nonverbal cues in CMC, people will inherently
find it inherently less rich and/or less present when compared to FtF interactions. Walther argues that the
filtering out of nonverbal cues doesn’t hinder an individual’s ability to form an impression of someone
over time in a CMC context. Walther asserts that over time, relationships formed in a CMC context can
develop like those that are FtF. He does admit that these relationships will take more time to develop,
but the relationships can reach the same end states as relationships formed FtF.
Walther later expanded his ideas of social information processing to include a new concept he
dubbed hyperpersonal interactions. 68 interactions are those that go above and beyond
Interpersonal Communication 434