Ithiel de Sola Pool (szerk.), The Social Impact of the Telephone

Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977.

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CONCLUSIONS

This paper began by asking what effect, if any, the withdrawal of the visual channel has on human communication. The answer that emerges from these experiments goes some way toward explaining the extraordinary success of the telephone over the last 100 years. In information transmission and problem-solving conversations, the withdrawal of vision has no measurable effect of any kind on the outcome of the conversation. In conflict and person perception conversations, however, the medium does affect the outcome. Even here the practical importance of the differences remains open to question. For example, in real life the telephone is likely to be used in conjunction with face-to-face meetings and interpersonal judgments are made in the face-to-face meetings. Most of the effects of medium have been subtle, small, and elusive. Consistent results (for example, the effect on opinion change in conflict tasks and the effect on evaluations in person perception tasks) have been achieved only by using ingenious experimental designs and highly sensitive measures. Moreover, these differences do not show the telephone inferior to face-to-face contact in any simple sense. For example, if the objective of negotiation is to change the opinion of the other person, then the telephone could be preferred as producing more opinion change. And while the face-to-face condition produced more favorable and confident evaluations, there is no evidence that these evaluations were any more accurate.

The experiments described here provide a convincing demonstration of the telephone's effectiveness. The results suggest that in many cases the benefit of adding a facial display to the telephone will be very small indeed. It also shows that Bell's means of conveying speech captures to a remarkable extent the whole process of human conversation.