19.2 Effective Media Use: Four Considerations

1) The Push-Pull Dilemma

The “you should have told me!” / “you should have looked it up!” argument is an encapsulation of the Push-Pull Dilemma, which looks at how to best get messages to the audiences who need them.

In “push media,” the active party is the source of the information, and uses one or more channels to actively send a message to potentially interested audiences. This may take the form of emails, text messages, voicemail, newsletters, direct mail advertising, television commercials, billboards, or any other means to “get the word out” to receivers. Obviously, these are a mainstay of modern life, and are unlikely to go away by the time you read this. So what’s the problem?

Let’s start with your reaction when you’re asked if you’d like to receive “push notifications.” Say you hear a weird news tidbit and want the complete story, so you trace the story back to its original source, which turns out to be the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Since that newspaper is always on the lookout for new readers, before you can get to the story you see a pop-up message asking if you’d like to receive “push notifications” so you don’t miss out on the latest Chattanooga news. Assuming you’ll never visit that site again, you click no — but after doing this enough times on enough sites, you develop the habit of refusing push notifications from all sources, even in your neck of the woods. Maybe you just don’t like the sound of the phrase “push notification” (just add a “y” to the end of the first word).

Add to this the information overload problem (mentioned in Chapters 4 and 13): many people feel bombarded with too much information to begin with. When I ask my students how many unread emails they have in their inboxes, it’s not uncommon for a few to confess that they have more than 5,000. A few students say “zero!”; it takes a lot of work to achieve this, and must involve many quick decisions about what to delete without reading, and these students are rare. Some email formats include prioritization systems that try to help you identify “important” emails, but I think it’s safe to say that no one wants the emails they send out to end up in the “unimportant” category or be deleted without a glance, so those systems run up against the “every message is important!” mentality.

Anyone in the public communication business should acknowledge that not everyone who receives their messages is in the “target audience” category (LINK TO Chapter 5, section D), and shouldn’t get upset to find that some recipients fall into the “unintended” category. But they should also acknowledge that even people who invited those messages can get overwhelmed and reach the “tune out” point.

Speaking of targeting, push notifications tend to belong in the category of undifferentiated messages: in terms of efficiency, it’s a lot easier to send the same message to everyone rather than attempting to tailor it to specific audiences, and some channels don’t offer any way of changing the message to suit different recipients.

“Pull media,” on the other hand, do allow recipients to seek out the messages they need and ignore the rest. In a pull medium, it’s the end recipient who does the active work — looking up a website, calling a hotline, or requesting information. Imagine if the IRS tried to send out instructions to every possible category of taxpayer about recent changes in the tax code. It’s infinitely easier to set up a website where a small business owner can find the page they need, an unmarried filer who made charitable donations can go to a different page, and a retiree living in Bermuda can look somewhere else. This system allows for easier targeting of specific audiences: they can find the message that’s tailored just to them.

This system isn’t perfect, however. For one thing, it relies on the person knowing that they need to go to that website in the first place. People are understandably frustrated when they discover only after the fact that there was a piece of information someone knew and could have told them (Mr. Prosser or the Vogons in the Hitchhiker’s Guide story), and feel it’s unfair to blame the victim for not knowing information they didn’t know they needed to know.

This system also relies on “ease of access,” which requires good web designers or easy-to-reach operators to handle hotline calls so that the information seeker doesn’t get frustrated and give up. Many people who get lost in a complex website or caught in a “phone tree” (“To open a new credit card account, press 1; to get your balance on an existing card, press 2….”) bail out before they get what they want.

If your job is communication, how do you handle the push-pull dilemma? There are no simple guides, but understanding the dilemma can help you make wise choices. If you send out push notices, try not to send too many or they will backfire and be ignored. If you set up a site from which people can pull information, consider sending occasional push notifications to make sure people know about it, and do everything you can to make it user-friendly. Either way, it’s going to be hard work, and you’ll inevitably face frustrated customers no matter what you do.

2) Media Richness

Two movies that came out in 2009 addressed the question “What is the best way to deliver sensitive information?” One of those films was Up In The Air, featuring George Clooney as a person who fires employees for a living. Some organizations outsource that task, hiring another company to lay off their employees, and Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham ,works for one of those firms. It’s a very inefficient business, requiring Ryan to fly all over the country 300+ days a year so he can break the bad news in the gentlest way possible.

He is offended at the suggestion by a young associate, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), that it’s much cheaper and quicker to fire people over a video call. In Ryan’s mind, the cost to do the task in person (without the use of any media) is worth it for three reasons:

1. The media has limitations (what if someone storms out of the room when they hear they are being fired?).
2. The topic is one that should allow for back-and-forth conversation that incorporates the nonverbal realm as well as the verbal.
3. The use of a more “efficient” mode sends the message that the company doesn’t care about its employees.

It’s a lesson that many real companies have missed, including Google, which fired 12,000 employees by email in January 2023. This led to headlines like “A Google Software Engineer Says It Was a ‘Slap in the Face’ to Find Out He Was Laid Off Via Email After 20 Years at the Company” and “Layoffs by Email Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers.”

In contrast, the U.S. Army must sometimes send an even more sensitive message than “You’ve been fired”: their Casualty Notification Officers (CAOs) are the people who tell the family members of fallen officers that their loved one has died. The Army knows that in order to send the message “the United States Army is genuinely concerned with its personnel and their families,”, they need to deliver it in person, not through any media, even though the time frame is tight (within four hours of the death), delivery of the message requires travel, and the death can happen at any time of day. The Army’s approach is depicted in the other relevant 2009 movie, The Messenger, in which the characters played by Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster take that duty very seriously. The Army, in other words, appears to have a better grasp on Media Richness Theory than Google does.

When Richard Daft and Robert Lengel first developed Media Richness Theory (MRT), it was before most modern communication technology was around, and they weren’t thinking about death notification or layoffs: they were just interested in how people use different kinds of media in the workplace. The first part of the model involves ranking different communication channels in terms of how “rich” or “lean” they are, depending on certain criteria:

1. How many different kinds of information cues can the channel handle simultaneously? Lean media can only convey written words or still images; rich media can include moving images and sound. The “richest” option is to not use any media and to communicate face-to-face, which allows things that even high-tech options don’t, such as smell and touch.
2. Does it allow rapid feedback? An asynchronous channel that creates a lag between when a message is sent and when the recipient responds (such as “snail mail” letters, email, or voicemail) is not as rich as a synchronous medium, such as a live phone call or video conferencing, where the conversation occurs in real time.
3. Does it have a personal focus?^[1] Is the channel tailored toward a particular recipient, or is it just directed at an undifferentiated mass audience? A text message written just for you is rich; an email alert sent to thousands of people is lean.

What’s nice about this model is that it sets up a framework that can be applied to future communication channels, even if we can’t foresee them now (just as it applies to channels that weren’t available in the 1980s, when the model was developed).

You might think that, since newer technology allows richer messages, we are steadily moving up the richness scale. For example, if bulk mail messages are lean because they don’t have a personal focus (letters addressed to “Current Resident” are at the bottom of the richness scale), modern printing technology allows at least the illusion of personal focus (now it says “Dear Jordan” where it used to say “Current Resident”).

The problem with lean media is not just that they don’t convey as much meaning: it’s that people often overestimate how clearly their messages come across. Writers of emails or texts, for example, are usually quite confident that the recipient can accurately pick up the intended tone of the email, such as light-hearted bantering or sarcasm. But sometimes recipients can’t figure out the intended tone, and are left wondering “Is the writer upset?”

A particularly awkward example was posted on Reddit in 2017:

I am here for you
byu/selahbrate inUnexpected

If the recipient (in blue) had been able to hear the tone of voice of “I am here for you,” or see who was sending the message, they wouldn’t have interpreted it as social support.

To help prevent this sort of misinterpretation, people often suggest including emojis or typographical clues (such as AlTeRnAtInG UpPeR AnD LoWeR CaSe to denote sarcasm). Scholars use the phrase “cues filtered out” to denote the kind of information that doesn’t come through in lean media.^[2]

Given those problems, are lean media losing their relevance? Not entirely. Billboards, posters, and pre-printed direct mail advertisements still play a role in modern life, and many people prefer to use their smart phones to send (lean) text messages instead of making a (rich) phone call. If you go back and watch old sci fi movies, many of them predict a future full of synchronous video conversations. Curiously, though, none of them predict that people in the 21st century would rather just type with their thumbs most of the time.

They also don’t predict the prevalence of “pop up” and “pop under” advertisements on video channels — the kind you may think of as just an easily ignorable box at the bottom of a video you want to watch. If you can make a commercial with live actors speaking, music, and dancing, why pay for a text-only ad that sits at the bottom of a window? The answer, of course, is that it’s much cheaper: advertising rates have always been aligned with the richness of the medium. Television ads were more expensive than radio ads because they were more effective, so advertisers made decisions based on what they could afford. Are the “lean” commercials worth it? Apparently so, because advertisers keep paying for them.

In the workplace, the issue of cost looks a little different: your boss doesn’t have to pay for airtime, but does have to make decisions about time and effort. The common expression “I survived another meeting that should have been an email” represents the idea that a lean email would have been fine for the employee; the topic didn’t justify the boss choosing a channel that carries many information cues, allows rapid feedback, and has a personal focus.

This brings us to the second part of the MRT, which provides more concrete guidelines than the Push-Pull Model:

• If the message is emotionally sensitive and inherently personal (“You are no longer needed at our company”), choose a rich channel.
• If the recipient is likely to have a lot of questions (“Do I get a severance package?”), choose a rich channel.
• If the message is meant for just one person (“This isn’t a mass layoff; only you are being laid off”), choose a rich channel.
• If those criteria don’t apply, choose a lean channel.

Of course, choosing a rich channel sometimes requires courage. In both Up in the Air and The Messenger, those delivering the sensitive messages have to deal with very upset people, and as Woody Harrelson warns his protege as they’re walking up to a war widow’s front door, “Some of them do have guns.” If you fire someone over email, you don’t have to worry about any of that. Imagine a boss who has to tell an employee that their coworkers have been complaining about their hygiene: it’s so awkward that it’s no surprise many bosses don’t opt for the personal focus (“Kevin, you need to bathe more frequently”) and instead just put a poster on the wall announcing a new hygiene policy that applies to everyone.

One subplot in Up in the Air deals with MRT in a context other than firing employees: Natalie’s fiancé breaks up with her over text message, which seems like a cowardly act that flies in the face of those guidelines. At least the fiancé didn’t ghost her. Ghosting refers to just not replying to someone you’ve been in conversation with, leaving them to figure out on their own what happened. On the MRT scale, “No message at all” would be below even the leanest of media. No wonder Dr. Theresa DiDonato ranks this the worst of seven strategies for breaking up with a romantic partner.

Some employers have been surprised to go through a lengthy hiring process with a new employee and expect them to show up for the first day of the job, only to have that employee ghost them without explanation. But a BBC study reveals how many employers themselves are ghosting prospective employees, leading to a “ghosting spiral.” With ever more rich channels of communication becoming available to everyone, this reverse trend implies that there is more to learn about this concept. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he did it to create a new way that people could communicate with each other; 150 years later, people are using their phones to avoid communicating with each other.

3) Redundancy

One of my friends loves the old joke, “The Department of Redundancy Department.” Redundancy sounds like an annoying thing — saying the same thing in different ways, repeating yourself, and expressing an identical thought in multiple ways (see what I did there?). But redundancy is good, because it beats the alternative: saying something just once, in one way, and assuming everyone got the message.

If your job is to ensure that the public receives a message, you should definitely send the message out more than once, because you can’t assume that all audience members are tuning in at the same time, or that they will remember the message after hearing it once. You should also use multiple channels to convey the message, since different audience members follow different channels. The problem with the Vogons posting the demolition orders in Alpha Centauri is not just that they’re relying on people to pull that information, but that they assume everyone in the galaxy can travel to distant planets. That’s not too different from assuming that everyone checks your favorite social media site. If you really want to ensure that your message gets to everyone who needs to hear it, start by listing all the channels your recipients are likely to check and deciding how much effort you should make to reach all of those channels.

I once consulted with someone responsible for communications in the logging industry, which turns out to have a very diverse audience in terms of media use. He wrote a monthly newsletter, but struggled to keep track of all the means he had to use to distribute the newsletter to all the loggers spread out across the country. Some checked email regularly, some visited Facebook, some visited the organization’s website directly, some had a fax machine (still!), some had smartphones that read QR codes, some had older cell phones that could receive text messages but not visit websites, and some wanted him to just print out the newsletter on paper and mail it to them. This became a resource question: how much effort should you make to reach all those different audience segments? How much time does it take to duplicate the same content on various websites, and make sure they all match? How many stamps should you buy? How expensive is an extra phone line just for the fax machine?^[3]

Like the “mostly dead but slightly alive” Polaroid cameras and vinyl records discussed in the previous chapter, new means of communication come along fairly regularly, but they rarely fully replace the old media.^[4] That means there is an ever-growing list of things to check, and people are not always patient with you if you forget their preferred platform. My daughter-in-law works the kind of job where she has three screens in front of her and lots of ways that people can reach her. A particularly anxious boss once sent her an email, and then six minutes later sent a text message asking her why she hadn’t yet replied to the email.

Three years ago, my cousin was organizing a large family reunion, and on a Zoom call with the relatives who volunteered to help set up the reunion, she touted the benefits of Slack and why it was superior to email. So the volunteers downloaded that app and gave it a try, which led to a small flurry of activity on Slack for about two weeks. Then the flurry dropped off; some never got the hang of the new app, others forgot to check it, and some were resistant to putting one more thing on their computer. How long did we use it before abandoning it? I’m not sure, because when I recently clicked on the icon (for the first time in several years), I was told my version was obsolete and I’d need to download the latest version, open the installer in my Downloads folder, drag the icon into my applications folder, add it to my dock, launch the app, and then connect to my account, at which point I’m sure I’d be asked what my password is, which I’ve forgotten.

I am not, in Everett Rogers’ terms, an Early Adopter. Rogers was fascinated with how new ideas catch on and spread throughout a population, a process he called Diffusion of Innovation. He found that it was not a simple mathematical process: one person hears about an idea and tells two friends about it, who each tell two other friends about it, who each tell two other friends until it multiplies across the globe. Instead, it was a process that depended heavily on different types of people with very different concerns and interests.

The first two categories of people, Innovators and Early Adopters, are eager to try out “the latest thing” and are the least worried that the innovation will not catch on (such as Google Glass, mentioned in Chapter 5). The difference between Innovators and Early Adopters is largely their level of influence with followers: Early Adopters are “opinion leaders” more than Innovators are. They are crucial to any innovation catching on, but they only represent 16% of the population.^[5]

Most of the population is split between the Early Majority, who are open to new ideas but not eager to jump on a new fad right away, and the Late Majority, who want more reassurances that the innovations won’t fail and they’ll be stuck with something they can’t use – and who also recognize that many forms of new technology come down in price later.

Last, there are the Laggards, who are the most reticent to try new things, are fine with what they’ve got, and would rather talk to you about how old rotary phones worked than touch a smartphone with a ten-foot pole.

These categories don’t necessarily map with demographic categories (there are people in their 90s with Apple watches!), but understanding your audience and where they might fit on this scale can help you determine what channels you should use to get your message out.

4) Anonymity

When Han Fei Tzu wrote about communication 2,200 years ago (see Chapter 5), or Aristotle wrote about “ethos” ( credibility) around the same time, they were thinking of  situations where people knew who they were talking to. Without media (or elaborate disguises), it’s not really possible to have a conversation with someone without knowing who they are. But communication technologies have made it quite easy to communicate anonymously.

Older forms of electronic communication allowed for only limited anonymous communication; you may have seen news stories where an informant speaks on television, but they’re in the dark and their voice is disguised. Anonymity reached a whole new level with the arrival of the internet in the 1990s: not only did the early architects of the internet decide to make it possible to communicate online without anyone knowing who you are, but it became quite normal.

When you make a new online account, the first thing you do is create a username. That name rarely tells the world much about who you are, or makes it easy for the public to find out more about you. The idea that everyone should be able to get your street address or phone number might seem highly risky — do you mean any crazy person could show up at your door, or call you randomly? Yet that’s exactly what phone books used to do, and every phone booth had one, which usually meant that a total stranger wouldn’t have to walk more than a city block or two to find your phone number and home address. When cell phones replaced landlines, some people suggested creating cell phone directories, but younger generations either didn’t see the need or were horrified at the thought, and the idea died out quickly. In other words, there’s a widespread assumption that letting everyone know who you are is a potentially dangerous thing to do… yet many people also strive to communicate with the largest audience they can, and hope something they post will go viral.

The anonymity of current media has led to many different kinds of problems. In Chapter 3, I wrote “If you look closely at all the ills facing modern society — war, racism, health, environment, financial crises, politics, sexual abuse — you will always find unethical communication hiding under those rocks.” Much of that unethical communication takes place underground: lies pushed forward by hidden sources, money coming into questionable causes from unidentifiable donors, shadowy advisors whispering into the ears of world leaders like Grima Wormtongue  in the Lord of the Rings series.

Perhaps the most damaging phenomenon that anonymity allows is cyberbullying and trolling: people taunting victims with the most cruel messages imaginable, which they would presumably not do if anyone could figure out who they were. In 2022, boxer Mike Tyson posted “Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it,” implying that they are “too comfortable” because they can hide behind an anonymous computer keyboard.

Of course, there are plenty of people who are willing to share every intimate detail of their life with whoever wants to hear it. Some parents make their children the stars of their social media feeds — nicknamed “sharenting” — raising concerns about the potential harm to those children . Those oversharing parents are just the current version of TV talk show hosts, like Kathie Lee Gifford, who told countless stories about their children on live television. The film The Truman Show depicts a man whose entire life has been unknowingly spent in front of television cameras, and large audiences who didn’t want to miss a single facet of his life. That movie came out in 1998, only a few years after the internet went mainstream, but as soon as the technology allowed it, some real-life vloggers happily chose to live-stream their daily lives. The only difference is the “unknowing” part: instead of being captured on hidden cameras, they set up those cameras themselves.

This is all meant to illustrate the range of choices people have about anonymity: some seek fame and show the world everything; some want the fame (or at least the influence) without people being able to identify who they are, such as the mysterious “Q” who founded QAnon or the English street artist Banksy; some might have preferred anonymity but were “thrust into the spotlight” by a scandal; some would prefer to go their whole life without any online presence.

When I talk to my students about credibility (LINK TO Chapter 9) and anonymity, many are quick to say that they are less likely to believe an anonymous source than an identified one. Take someone who is inside the inner circle of a prominent politician and leaks to the press some juicy tidbits “off the record”: the first thing many people want to know is why that source wasn’t willing to be identified. What are their motives? How much do they really know?

Those same students, however, recognize that when they fill out evaluations of their teacher at the end of a semester, it’s important that their name isn’t attached to the form. If you want to conduct a survey to find out more about racism, you’ll never get fully honest answers unless you promise anonymity to the respondents. Those people who are willing to talk about something on the news only if their voice is disguised are sometimes the only people who tell the unvarnished truth — it’s the people who want their name and face to be on the TV whose motives you should worry about.

So: if your goal is to get a message out to the public, it’s worth taking some time to carefully consider whether you want the world to know who you are — and if your answer is yes, how much do you want to share? Does including personal details in the message help to humanize it, or is that “oversharing”? As with so many facets of communication, there are many possible choices you could make, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.