ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a sample of the United States population's attitudes toward electronic voice response systems. Dennis A. Adams, Peter A. Todd, and R. Ryan Nelson found that e-mail is viewed as a medium that has significant impact on how individuals communicate within an organization, whereas voice mail is viewed only as a supplement to the telephone. When it comes to electronic communication technologies, more people use telephones than computers. The chapter discusses the gross contours of public opinion about voice response unit (VRU) technology. It analyses the VRUs with telephone answering machines to probe the overlaps and divergences in the public's mind about these roughly parallel technologies. Age, gender, income, and education are all significant predictors of one's attitude toward answering machines. Specifically, younger respondents, females, and those with higher levels of education and income were most likely to respond favorably to answering machines.
