Contextualising Media Choice Using Genre Analysis

While media use becomes increasingly important in virtualized work contexts, traditional media choice theories exhibit a range of shortcomings with regard to practical application. The paper presents an approach for contextualizing media choice using genre analysis. In doing so, the communication of a team can be captured as a repertoire of genres and as such be made accessible for subsequent analysis. An improved media selection results from a comparison of genre requirements with the characteristics of available communication media (in terms of a genre-media-fit). The identified genres allow illustrating the intended benefits of the proposed media as well as possible ways of application in rich and vivid ways. The presented approach represents an important step in the development of a method for team communication analysis to be used in a consultancy context.