Mission: Make contact with the leader of the local stonemason’s guild.

            Will your party hire a courier to deliver a sealed letter, use Sending, or show up on her doorstep in person? The medium we use to convey our messages is often powerfully influenced by the social expectations and networks with which we associate. Even more of concern for Caroline Haythornwaite’s theory is the sheer number of media we use within a single interpersonal relationship. In strong relationships, we tend to use multiple (different) media forms, making those communication patterns potentially more complex. Hence, Media Multiplexity (MM) Theory.

Scholarship of the cybernetic tradition believes we can map out the webs of our relationships. Relational bonds are weak if they take up little time and energy. Stronger ties take more. Your adventuring party grows stronger ties to one another as the time they spend together increases, their adventures advance in emotional intensity, they become more intimate, and act cooperatively.

Imagine an adventuring party where two members not only share the same alignment, but worship the same god. Each is likely to feel more accepted and closer to the other, reciprocally making their relational ties stronger. This doesn’t mean that a party with universally strong ties is best, however. Two players who know all the ins and outs of worshipping one god will probably share a lot of redundant information. Similarity and sharing are not enough, however, according to MM. Multiple channels are necessary. The theory makes three key claims.

First, the closer a pair of people are (the stronger their relational tie), the more likely they will be to use multiple channels of communication. The inverse is also true. It’s our closeness which gives energy to our use of various media for communication. The medium does not seem to change the topic of our talk, nor does it prevent the maintenance of close relational ties. 

Second, we tend to arrange media channels in a hierarchy with some being more highly valued than others. However, the ranking varies from person to person and relationship to relationship. The stonemason’s guild leader does not necessarily value a personal visit, over a letter, over a Sending spell. You can probably think of obvious reasons why this might be. In relationships, the partners themselves determine the value of different communication channels. Your secret lover might more highly value a text message over a bouquet of flowers sent to their work. Both communicate. With strong ties, more private channels are likely valued as ways to maintain the relationship. There is no “best” medium of communication except for the medium determined by the interactants as “best”.

Third, manipulating access to certain media has a disproportionate impact on weaker ties.  If the only way you can contact your party’s patron is via a magic chest, you’d best not lose that chest. By contrast, if you can communicate with the members of your party face-to-face, via a Message or Sending spell, or through notes and letters, losing one of these media probably won’t matter that much to you. Stronger ties tend to have redundancy; weaker ties do not.

For dungeonmasters, I think about this theory when I consider the ways I can communicate with my party members: direct texts, emails, phone calls, group texts, and face-to-face. While it does seem to confirm the tenets of MM, there are probably other factors at play here in the interaction of relationship tie strength and media channels used.  For instance, I’m not a Facebook user; haven’t been for years.  If that were the only way my party communicated, I might have some real reservations about employing that medium simply because I dislike it so much. 

Media Multiplexity should draw our attention to the way we think about media use in our different types of relationships. The medium of communication should match the person/relationship more than the message. We’ll talk about almost anything through almost any medium.  It’s frequently the person we want to connect with and focus on, not the medium by which we do it.