Media choice is an important topic in the field of organizational communication. With a plethora of media choices (e.g., letter, e-mail, voice mail, telephone, face-to-face meetings), the question of how and why individuals choose which medium to use in what situation takes on additional importance. This concern is also shared in professional communication. I present a summary of a paper (Kinney and Watson) that tests the applicability of a prominent theory of media choice, media richness theory (MRT), to both traditional and new electronic forms of communication. I summarize the findings and present some implications for professional communication.

This study focuses on people's choices between electronic mail and voice mail. We found that users generally preferred electronic mail over voice mail for most communication purposes. These results do not support a hypothesis derived from media richness theory that voice mail would be preferred to e-mail for ambiguous situations. A more important finding is that other medium features besides richness influence individuals' media choices, specifically, medium features useful for retrieving and preparing messages and for working In group settings. From this and other evidence, we conclude that a complex set of social factors governs organizational media use in ways that neither theory can fully explain. Our findings have some interesting implications for designers of multimedia communication systems and for people like human resources specialists who are concerned with improving the effectiveness of professional work and the quality of working life.