Media Richness Theory and the Strange Case of Mobile Video Calls

According to the media richness theory [1], video conferencing, including mobile video calls, transmits more information and communication cues than voice calls. The theory posits that video calls should be more efficient for ambiguous communication tasks. It also suggests that higher social presence in video calls should imply greater immediacy and warmth of the communication.

Mobile video calls have been around several years now, without gaining the expected popularity. It remains to be seen if this can be changed by reinventing the wheel. However, many of the inherent problems in mobile video calls are now well understood. In the following, I summarize the main problems identified and discussed by O'Hara et al.  [2]:

Social context and privacy issues

• Loud speaker usage, others can hear the conversation
• Users tend to speak louder
• Visibility of display
• Social acceptability - it looks weird to talk to your phone
• Lack of prior knowledge of the recipient context
• Outsiders are unwillingly captured by video or audio

Too much information

• More difficult to withhold information
• Increased self-consciousness - how do I look?
• Strange camera angle showing straight up your nose

Let's forget the privacy issues for now, assuming that both participants are in private contexts. Let's also not concentrate on the Mum effect and delivering bad news (see [3] for discussion). Here are the questions I'm after: Are the benefits of media richness overshadowed by the increased self-consciousness and ugly camera angle? Are there other factors affecting the low popularity of video calls? And finally, which communication medium would you prefer (see the poll)?

Final results of the poll:

Would you prefer video calls over voice calls in the following communication tasks:

Calling your grandma for a casual conversation	5 (55%)
Planning a coursework with a student you don't know	2 (22%)
Calling your phone operator regarding confusion in your phone bills	1 (11%)
Asking a colleague for an advice	3 (33%)
None of the above	4 (44%)

[1] Daft, R.L. & Lengel, R.H. 1986. Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design. Management Science 32(5), 554-571.

[2] O'Hara, K., Black, A., & Lipson, M. 2006. Everyday practices with mobile video telephony. In Proceedings of CHI '06, 871-880.

[3] Sussman & Sproull. 1999. Straight talk: delivering bad news through electronic communication. Information Systems Research 10:2, 150-166.