Communication Technology –

too much choice or too little freedom?

By Sophia Chawla

In 2007, an acclaimed journalist Walter Kirn wrote an article about the economic, health and social impacts of current communication technology. When describing the current social context in relation to technology, Kirn describes it as “an eara of roaring zeros years of over-enlarged, overextended, technology-driven and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human capacities in the dream of infinite connectivity” (Kirn 157). As implied by Kirn, communication technology has virtually obliterated scarcity and has created a seemingly never-ending flow of information, dumping huge amounts of data, facts, opinions and views over a short period of time, causing people to have not only more knowledge, but to also have more choice on what knowledge to gain. But to what extent can such a large amount of available choice be debilitating? Does communication technology demonstrate a paradox of choice? Should there be less choice? Or, should choices be portrayed differently enough so that the audience can determine what they want? Such is the issue of multi-faceted communication technology. Although communication technology spreads messages through various virtual mediums, giving the audience more choice in what information to gain and how to gain such information, the many choices of virtual mediums available to audiences can overwhelm them and ultimately cause them to be more desensitized and less persuaded. This would change the way how persuaders display choice to the audience. Namely, persuaders must focus on fewer choices for more response.

In order to understand how the many choices of communication technology impact the level of persuasion on an audience, choice in relation to persuading and connecting with audience must be defined and examined. According to Kurk Motensen’s guide book Persuasion IQ, in the world of public communication, choice is commonly perceived as a powerful tool for public communicators to use in order to connect with and persuade the audience. Motensen justifies that people would feel the need for choice because “people would feel the need for freedom and the ability to make their own decisions” (246).  By offering choice, public communicators successfully tap into two important values that most audience members cherish: freedom and liberty.  Therefore, it can be concluded that there exists an absolute, universal definition of choice in relation to persuasion and rhetoric. Barry Schwartz, a writer and philosopher who studied the dilemma and paradox of choice, described this universal definition as the “official dogma” of choice, which states that “to maximize freedom is to maximize choice…the more choice we have, the more freedom we have. The more freedom we have, the more welfare we will have” (1:26). From this reasoning, it can be concluded that choice can be defined as the factor that ultimately yields to the overall benefit and happiness to the people. With more options, people do not feel restrained, and with no restraint, people feel more satisfied.

Today, public communicators try to utilize the power of choice in many different ways. The goal of the many different ways is to deliver messages to the audience in a way that they are able to and wish to receive it. Persuaders take advantage of current communication technology to utilize the tool of choice. But in order to see how communication technology shares a relationship with choice, we first must discuss what entails today’s communication devices. Today’s communication technology usually works in multi-functional ways because they contain multi-functional features. According to Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which discusses the impacts of the internet’s artificial-intelligence technology on human cognitive capacity, a typical device “subsumes most of our other technologies” by becoming many things such as “our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our television, and our radio and TV” (Carr 24).   A  Communication device is like the nesting doll to other devices that used to be separate entities. In this case, Carr examines the internet, an example of today’s communication technology. Technically, the internet is composed of numerous devices within one device. And because this kind of technology exists, people are able to easily access and utilize many kinds of technology within one without having the burden to physically switch from one device to another.

Given that communication devices are multifunctional and that they save the audience the burden from switching from one device to another, the audience can receive practical and intellectual benefits from the many mediums that communication technology offers. Each benefit interconnects to achieve satisfaction on an individual and massive level. Practically, because we would not have the burden of switching devices to view a certain piece of information, we are able to view, absorb and process more kinds of information in less time. Because we have the power to access these mediums at one place and one time through user-friendly features, we have the ability to glide and skim across the surface of various mediums while accumulating fragments of information quicker and processing them quicker than we ever did when relying on and submersing into a single medium.  Intellectually, collecting fragmentary information over a short-span of time causes an individual’s knowledge to expand much more for the long-run because with vast choice comes not only more access, but more connectivity due to more amounts of information that can be absorbed. And such information can come from races, countries, cultures and ethnicities of all kind, giving the audience a richer perspective on issues, ideas and concepts.  When combined, the intellectual and practical impacts of communication technology can be summed up in a process that Kirn calls “autonomy through automation” (Kirn 158).  Autonomy, or control and choice of an individual, is achieved through automation, or the computerization of information mediums. Computerizing information is the practical component, the gathering information in one place, and when information is in one place, we can easily choose the medium to our specific liking. However, since each of us chooses different mediums independently, we end up gaining information and connecting with their counterparts, hence achieving autonomy and intellectual expansion simultaneously. Journalists August E. Grantand and Jennifer H. Meadows describe this as “the nervous system of contemporary society, transmitting and distributing sensory and control information and interconnecting a myriad of independent units” (Grantand & Meadows 1). Therefore, with communication technology, people achieve massive connection with each other by means of isolated, individual actions.

In spite of the practicality and intellectuality that multi-functioning communication technology has to offer, there are drawbacks that the audience suffers from such a large array of choices that they offer. Communicative devices were designed with beneficial intentions to respond to two major trends in media changes. The first thing that their multi-faceted nature responds to an era that is depicted by media information dependency, an era in where communication technology has decreased barriers in between us and people of different ethnicities, cultures, races, and other differences that we constantly must depend on various media outlets to make even more decisions than we ever had (Martinson 159). The second trend that communication technology responds to is the main goal of today’s multimedia, which is to not tell the audience what to think, but what to think about (Martinson 155). Values of freedom and choice have caused a more subjective, non-absolute media world that does not force, but provokes many beliefs and ideas that audience may have never considered. But due to the urgent need of making fast yet thoughtful decisions on thinking about what to believe, we the audience can feel too much pressure to a point where choice-making gradually causes paralysis, or when there are so many options that it becomes difficult for us to perform cost-benefit analyses to make the out right choice (Schwartz). This confusion roots from the fact that communication technology subsumes the forms of many other devices. Having many devices in one basically means having many mediums in one, and having many mediums to choose from can ultimately give us too much information to chose from. The expression of too much information, in turn, can backfire by getting rid of simplicity, a very important factor needed for memorable, attention-catching speeches (Kurck 30) and over-persuading the audience by featuring something that the audience may not understand or not be interested in. (Kurck 30). Excessive persuasion has a direct relationship with excessive information, in that the more information there is, the more perspectives and differences that need to be examined, and the more perspectives there are the more trouble the audience will have in making up their minds. Should an individual ever chose which virtual medium to follow and what information to examine and process, he may gain the facts and knowledge needed to form an opinion, but he may feel less satisfied with the results of the medium he chose because of regretting how he could have chosen a better, more attractive source. Here, it is shown that with high choice to begin with, the decider is completely responsible for his initial decision and must bear the consequences of missing out on another medium that would have provided more valuable information. This regret would subtract from overall satisfaction of the audience and then would lead the audience to be less persuaded and to have greater resistance against any other kind of communication that tries to influence them. (Freedman and Steinburner 680).

Contrary to having a vast amount of virtual mediums to chose from, communication technologies that used to involve a low number of choices can be more liberating than the intentions of high-choice mediums. According to his recent study about the comparisons between old and new communication technology, David L. Martinson believes that prior to mechanized mediums, people mainly gathered around messengers that were word-of-mouth, or networks that passed information from person to person by oral communication (Meadows 158). Since oral communication is much more intimate and direct than non-oral communication, people absorbed from oral mediums more and were persuaded by such a medium, even when having a lack of choice thereof (Meadows 159). Because the audience was more persuaded, they solidified their opinions faster, which helped them develop deeper, interpersonal relationships tighter social ties and easier income of information and hence decision making. (Meadows 159) Because of feeling that there are fewer choices in stake, the chooser would not feel as completely responsible for the decision. Although he may feel that he was forced to make the decision to some extent, which is something seldom done to the audience in public communication, the chooser would not feel as responsible for the choice. And since the chooser would feel less responsible, then he would feel less disappointment and less regret about his choice and thus would have the ability to be more susceptible to any faults that choice would have, making it easier for him to admit his wrong than it would be for high-choice subject and making him more susceptible to having a change in opinion.

Due to the paralysis that the variety of choices that communication technology causes, it is the job of public communicators to determine whether or not they should acknowledge that less might be more to grab his audience’s attention. Numerous models or rules have been devised in order to aid the public communicator in choosing the right virtual medium to gain audience attention and support. Two major theories were devised by sociologist Heeren Elske and others in their experiment. One is the rational choice approach, which states that every medium has fixed characteristics for fixed situations and tasks that are used solely to achieve efficiency in presentation (Elske 4). The other approach is known as the social-influence choice, which emphasizes selecting media in respect to the overall social context (Elske et. al. 4). The former approach is more up to the persuader, whereas the latter is determined by the overall likings of the people. The drawbacks of having the persuader to chose the medium is that he would risk losing the attractiveness of his message because of having members of the audience that may not be acquainted with the medium. In the same breath, choosing a medium in respect to the social context would be troublesome, for it would be hard to track down the many preferences that each member of the audience may have. So when it comes to the role of choice in communication technology devices, choice befuddles the audience and the persuader. It befuddles the audience in that the audience finds difficulty in choosing a medium to gain information from, and it befuddles the persuader in that the persuader would find it burdensome to decide whether to communicate through one, absolute medium of his own liking, or though many mediums of the audience’s liking. In either case, it can be seen that choice is being thrust upon everybody because of the expectation to make more decisions at an ever faster rate.

The many options of virtual medium that the never-ending connectivity of communication technology offers reveal a paradox of in the commonly perceived definition of choice. the paradox is that having many opportunities may cause more limitation and ultimately debilitation. Technology should be simplified in a way where people can make more confident choices about their information, their opinions, and ultimately their beliefs.

Bibliography

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic Monthly July 2008. Print

Fiedmna, Jonathan, and John B. Steinbecker. “PERCEIVED CHOICE AND RESISTANCE TO PERSUASION”. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Grant, August E., and Jennifer Harman. Meadows. Communication Technology Update and Fundamentals. Amsterdam: Focal/Elsevier, 2008. Print.

Kirn, Walter. “The Autumn of the Multitaskers.” The Atlantic Nov 2007: print

Martinson, David. L. (2004). Media Literacy Education: No Longer a Curriculum Option. Educational Forum, The, 68(2), 154-160

Mortensen, Kurt W. Persuasion IQ: The 10 Skills You Need to Get Exactly What You Want. New York: AMACOM/American Management Association, 2008. Print.

Schwartz, Barry. Paradox of Choice. N.p.: n.p., Web. 2 May 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM>.

Verwijs, Heeren V. “Guidelines for Media Selection.” . Print.