Some of the CMU folks analyzed the messages that appeared on an Andrew
bulletin board at CMU. The bboard they analyzed was a private one for
the ITC, the place where Andrew was developed, so it can probably be
assumed to be one of the "best case" scenarios for multimedia mail --
that is, nearly everyone is fairly sophisticated and well-versed in the
mechanisms of multimedia mail. They analyzed two months' worth of
traffic on the bboard, to see which of the multimedia mechanisms were
most heavily used. Naturally, you would expect lower multimedia usage
rates in a less sophisticated and less homogeneous community. However,
these data are interesting for the insight they give into which features
are useful enough to be commonly used by at least *some* community.
I'm not going to wade back into this controversy, but I think your assumptions
here are badly flawed. Sophistication has nothing to do with the use of
multimedia mail. It depends on what the community is communicating about.
Graphical design? Imagery? Budgets? Your community was probably passing
around design reviews, commentaries, meeting notices, etc. Different
communities make lesser or heavier use of different parts of the system and
it has nothing to do with sophistication. It might have to do with ease of
use and whether the non-text parts of the system have sufficient
functionality to make it worthwhile to carry on a communication using them.
That's not meant as a dig at any particular system. I have the same
complaint about the conclusions of various scientific studies on the use of
email that seem to be heavily impacted by technological artifacts.
In fact, you might see more "sophisticated" users making less use of parts of
the system. "I'm not going to send around this color image - it's too big!"
While a naive user just does it (naively assuming it will work!). We had a
user include a 10MB core file as an enclosure in a bug report....not something
you'd see in a sophisticated community. (It worked, too, although it ate up
most of our /home partition).
You need to exercise care in the use of the terms "naive" and "sophisticated".
Other communities may not be sophisticated about the design of computer
systems, but they are sophisticated at what they do--and will make use
of tools that are easy to use and help them get their work done.
Terry