Media Richness & Advice to the New Administration

When considering media richness, it’s important to consider the chart published in the 1983 publication of the paper “Information Richness. A New Approach to Managerial Behavior and and Organizational Design” that depicts the Information Medium and its level of Information Richness. At the time of publication, social media did not exist, but it doesn’t seem to fit into a specific information medium as listed at the time. If given its own medium, it would likely be above “numeric formal,” but below “written, formal documents.” However, we must consider that the mediums of social media can be both personal or broad in their breadth.

The paper states that it’s premise is “that organizational success is based on the organization’s ability to process information of appropriate richness &, reduce uncertainty and clarify ambiguity.”

While “low variety languages” were considered by Daft and Wiginton to be those used to communicate “effectively about well-understood, unambiguous topics,” it seems that the Trump administration’s use of twitter both during the campaign and since taking office have relied on low variety languages to communicate with their millions of followers. This method seems to have hit a successful note with his die-hard fans, but in order to win over the rest of Washington and the nation, he’s going to need to produce a lot more quality content than simply posting defensive tweets every time someone is critical of him. Examples:

If I were advising his team on social media based on the media richness theory, I would suggest letting the President’s actions speak for themselves through his behavior and acts, if he truly wants to “Make America Great Again.” Documenting these, and starting conversations over the real underlying issues is what will give us media rich content that is not confusing and misleading to the public.

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