What About Feedback?
This work highlights a gap in understanding feedback effects in digital communication, which could impact users of video conferencing tools, but it is incremental as it builds on older studies and suggests future research rather than presenting new results.
The paper addresses the lack of recent research on immediate feedback in group conversations, particularly in modern computer-mediated communication like video conferencing, and proposes a new research program to study augmenting video-conferencing with immediate feedback based on three in-person studies.
The role of immediate feedback in-group conversations has received scant attention in the recent literature. While studies from the early 1990's suggested that "added information" in the form of non-verbal cues would allow video conferencing to "augment" the audio-only conference in terms of effectiveness, stunningly little follow-on research has been done reflective of the current state of computer mediated communication, video conferencing, "live walls", etc. This article contrasts three studies of immediate feedback in in-person settings as the basis for suggesting a new research program - research to look at potential effects of augmenting video-conferencing with an immediate feedback channel.