Doctoral Dissertation

AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON OF COPRESENT AND
TECHNOLOGICALLY-MEDIATED INTERACTION
BASED ON COMMUNICATIVE BREAKDOWN

by
ECKEHARD DOERRY

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Department of Computer and Information Science
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

December 1995

Preamble

After several years of neglect, a number of requests for my dissertation (how flattering!) brought to my attention that I no longer had an electronic, on-line version available. It turned out that this was not an easy problem to remedy --- the original dissertation was writting in Word5.1 for Mac using linked files containing the individual chapters, and an old version of Endnote. Updating it to Windows (which I work with now) and creating a single, correctly paginated (etc) electronic version presented some challenges. Overall this worked out well --- I think most of the formatting, pagination, and other problems were handled correctly. But there may still be small formatting or pagination errors that I missed; be warned.

Overview

The dissertation was motivated by a simple observation: despite the rapidly growing interest in computer-mediated communication (including my lasting interest in groupware technologies), I noted that we really had very little understanding of the efficacy, in fundamental communicative terms, of electronic environments compared to face-to-face communication. Sure, there had been studies on user satisfaction and outcomes/productivity. But what about the communication itself. How is that effected by moving in to a technologically-mediated environment --- and why? This very daunting "why" is critical in that, by more clearly understanding how a technologically-mediated channel impinges on the communicative process, we can hope to draw some general conclusions regarding fundamental limitations of not just of one particular environment or system, but of entire classes of communicative environments.

Whether the dissertation achieved this vision is a matter of opinion. The analysis certainly showed what we all suspected, namely, that there are statistically significant differences in communicative efficacy between copresent and technologically-mediated interaction. Surprisingly, no dramatic differences were found between the audio-only and audio-video environments. This statistical outcome was originally supposed to be the end of the dissertation, but I found it unsatisfying --- it really raised more questions than it answered. Fine, there are fewer breakdown in copresent interaction. But why? What causes breakdowns in the electronic environments? Specifically, what is it about the technologically-mediated environments that (a) makes them functionally different from coprosent interaction and (b) so similar to each other functionally? The qualitative analysis in Chatper 6 of individual breakdowns yielding broader insights as to why those breakdowns occurred is, in my view, some of the best and most interesting work I've done.

In general, the insights gained in this research have had a tremendous influence on my subsequent design of groupware systems, and my expectations as to their performance --- particularly with respect to what it's worth investing time/money in and what's not so useful (i.e. live video!). There has been no serious follow-up work. Frankly, the process of Breakdown Analysis developed in the dissertation, however insightful, was so arduous and draining that I was simply burned out on it afterwards, and chose to move on to other things. My hope is that someone else, with new eyes and fresh energy, will be motivated to further explore the methodology and the insights it permits.

Abstract

Links to Dissertation and Tech Report

Here is the full dissertation, as a PDF document.

Here is a tech report that was written as a follow-up, also in PDF form. Good if you just want to get a condensed overview of the highlights.