The link between communication and transportation was broken in 1844 when Samuel Morse opened the nation’s first telegraph line. No long was the speed of communication dependent on how fast a horse could gallop; information could travel instantaneously by means of wires from its point of origin to someone else. Since then our communication has evolved to a wireless society with portable telephones, cell phones, and mobile devices . These pieces of technology have become an ordinary part of our life in the United States. I chose a study by Burrel and Buzzannel in which they used Communication Accommodation Theory to explain how and why telephone communication could accommodate to others.This research provides a foundation for explaining issues of relationship forming and communication accommodation in an electronic environment.
Burrel and Buzzanell (1996) research was conducted over a 12 week time frame during which students(callers) attempted to converge or diverage with their professors’ answering machine message(callee). Burrel and Buzzanell(1996), chose an imbalanced power relationship because lower status individuals, such as students, often want to create positive impressions. One hundred and twenty-nine college student participated.
By using a variety of pretests and surveys, a panel of experts were able to create two distinct groups of messages, novel and routine messages. Then, 7 messages were created form these two distinct groups. The script of each message consisted of 6 parts: (1) greeting, (2) home/office owner’s name and/or phone number, (3) unavailability to respond to incoming calls, (4) request for caller’s name and phone number, (5) promise to respond to caller’s message, and (6) closing (Buzzel, 1996).
Novel message were out-of-the-ordinary, or as departures from messages typically found in interactions common amongst people. The experts developed three general types of novel messages that differed from each other in the way that they deviated from the basic script: a humorous style(limerick); and abundance of jargon (jargonistic message); and a message requesting much more information, then would be expected routinely(high demand).
Next, the expert panel, created four routine answering machine messages by replicating the same steps used for novel message creation. These message were more ordinary and standard, they did not contain humorous or jargonistic style scripted messages.
In their findings, Responses to messages that include either verbal politeness cues or structural politeness cues were significantly more polite, according to Burrel and Buzzanell, than responses to those messages that did not include such cues. Burrel maintains ,“that callers seemed to follow the callee’s lead for terms of address and closing, but not for greetings or signs of appreciation.”
Next the panel of exports recorded the lengths of each students message left on the professors answering machine . By calculating the length of messages from the callers’, experts could culminate a similarity or difference between the messages. According to Burrel (1996), there was a small, but statistically significant association between these two variables indicating a tendency for callers to match the length of the answering machine message.
Following CAT theory and limited telephone theories, my study seeks to identify whether individuals accommodate to verbal politeness cues and structural politeness. My study posits that these cues can be found in telephone communication.
In my research I explored the content to which a caller accommodates to a pre-recorded structural message found on my answering machine. I recorded voice mails for over one week. I had a total of nine voicemails. Six people were involved in my experiment; my mother, brother, dad, two friends of mine, and my boss at Giant Food and Drug Store. I conducted the study on my own because I felt that if I told the participants what I was doing callers would attempt convergence, in terms of the responses. My results illustrate that individuals modify their language choices to display similarities with their partner. Callers modified their language choices as a direct result to their established relationship with me. The closer the relationship I had with someone the more intimate the message would have sounded and vice versa.
The observations that serve as the foundation for CAT are primarily bases on face-to-face interaction. However, different types of research support opposing impacts of this idea.
Some researches argue that telephones are less personal than face-to-face communication (e.g., Perry and Lee 2007), while other argue that personal information actually does pass though messaging communication, however it takes more time for individuals to adjust to the medium to allow this information to pass (e.g., Walther, 1992). While it is important that communication theories are considered in face-to-face settings, it is also important that these theories are considered in telephone communication settings as well.
In conclusion, it is important to understand that telephone communication does not capture all the unique nuances and translate sound the way we would like them to carry. Mine and Burrel and Buzzanell results indicate that, even in mediated communication exchanges where there are very few opportunities to converge, individuals still modify their language choices and some message features to display similarity with interaction partners. Therefore, we must elevate our awareness while communicating by phone. We must be more conscious as to how we convey our information and how does it reflect what we want to say as well as what the listener wants to hear and or can understand. Listening and communication are inseparable partners as we all attempt to convey our thoughts and ideas so that others may understand them.Communication Theories: Perspectives, Processes, and Contexts
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