Expressive richness

Both theory and data suggest that that richer, more informal, and more interactive media should be better suited for handling the more complex, equivocal, and emotional aspects of collaborative tasks. To test this hypothesis, we constructed an experiment in which participants were required to make either written or spoken annotations to a document to help a fictional co-author revise it. We seeded relatively error-free texts with errors of different scope . The results provide strong evidence that a richer --in the sense of a more expressive -medium is especially valuable for the more complex, controversial, and social aspects of a collaborative task.