In face-to-face group situations, social pressure and organizational hierarchy relegate the less outspoken to silence, often resulting in fewer voices, fewer ideas, and groupthink. However, in mediated interaction like email, more people join in the discussion to offer their opinion. With this work, we aim to combine the benefits of mediated communication with the benefits and affordances of face-to-face interaction by adding a mediated back-channel. We describe Conversation Votes , a tabletop system that augments verbal conversation with a shared anonymous back-channel to highlight agreement. We then discuss a study of our design with groups engaged in repeated discussion. Our results show that anonymous visual back-channels provide a medium for the underrepresented voices of a conversation and balances interaction among all participants.
A meta-analysis of research comparing decision making in face-to-face versus computer-mediated communication groups was conducted. Results suggest that computer-mediated communication leads to decreases in group effectiveness, increases in time required to complete tasks and decreases in member satisfaction compared to face-to-face groups. All of the moderators tested (anonymity in the group process, limited versus unlimited time to reach decisions, group size, and task type) were significant for at least one of the dependent variables. The article concludes with cautions about the unbridled rush by organizations to adopt computer-mediated communication as a medium for group decision making and implications of the present findings for theory and research on computer-mediated communication and group decision making.
Berzelius failed to make use of Faraday's electrochemical laws in his laborious determination of equivalent weights.