Evolution of Communication

See “Evolution of Communication: From Email to Twitter and Beyond” just published on Read/Write web:

“We barely have time to pause and reflect these days on how far communications technology has progressed. Without even taking a deep breath, we’ve transitioned from email to chat to blogs to social networks and more recently to Twitter.”
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/evolution_of_communication.php

Let me first say that I use email, twitter and Skype and it’s been awhile since I sent a hand-written letter.

It’s true that there is a correlation between how quickly a message can travel and how quickly we expect someone to return a response. Does that mean that we expect people to think less about what we have written and what their response will be when we the communication mode is email, twitter or IM? If I send a hand written letter asking an important question or conveying a sincere sentiment and then I send an email with the same content, should the receiver put less thought into what I’m saying in the email compared to the handwritten letter.

Something else to consider, how many of us will pull up old emails from old friends or relatives and read them years later? Do you think we’ll do that with Twitter or Skype? This is something that people do with hand written letters.

Remember faxes? I couldn’t believe it when I could get a document from across town or across the globe in a matter of minutes. It was a miracle. And that was in 1989.
Telephones came from the phone company and were black. You thought twice about making a long distance call because of the cost.
Substantial change indeed.

Good points. I agree with you that when I send an e-mail I expect the person receiving to give it the priority it deserves, and I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote a hand-written letter. So perhaps as hand-written letters wane, the expectations that went with them are now attached to e-mail.

As far as other forms of communication, IM, twitter, blog comments, I would have to agree with the paper that I have less expectations for considered responses, in that sense that most of these, save the blog comment, are expected to be communicated fairly quickly if not instantly and thus there is less time to make a considered response.

If we think of the oft cited proposition in on-line asynchronous education, that students whose interactions are via written text often have more considered opinions compared to verbal interactions in a face-to-face classroom. I think the same type of thing happens as we move from mail to email, to IM, to Twitter and so on down the line.

Wow… great experiment. And one that, necessarily, brings with it questions about how one best makes use of this new comment medium. Do I read the whole paper, then go back and comment on each paragraph or do I comment as I go? The latter feels more like a conversation, but brings with it the potential for raising issues that are addressed later in the paper. How do I share my ‘big-picture’ thoughts on the paper overall when the little bits of my thinking have been scattered over multiple pages, sections and paragraphs?

You are right to highlight the point that the contextual visual clues offered by virtual worlds are very different to those in the real world. I think this is an area in which virtual worlds are very immature at the moment and that we will see significant development around this over the coming months and years.

In virtual worlds the face is much less important to providing that visual context than in real-life because one can never be sure what the other ‘people’ in the conversation are looking at – and even in the default case, the camera tends to be back behind one’s own avatar out of reach of a lot of facial detail. My suspicion therefore is that we’ll see a different kind of visual language emerging – an avatar body language if you like.

A virtual world like Second Life brings with it a default set of bodily gestures (laugh, shrug, etc.) but in my experience these are little used in general conversation. I think this is partly to do with the quality of the gesture animations and partly because of the clunkiness (the necessary keystrokes or whatever) of using them in a largely ‘chat’ environment. There have been various small-scale experiments at improving this, specifically in the context of education (Sloodle contains an educationally-oriented gesture HUD for example) but my suspicion is that we haven’t really worked out how to get these things used properly yet.

This area will evolve… I think we’ll see a growing set of conventions around avatar ‘body language’ and a significant maturation of tools, techniques and conventions to support this. More importantly, I think this has to happen before we will see anywhere near the full potential of virtual worlds as communication tools being realised.

I like the description of the pattern of the communication changes we’re living through, and I like being able to add marginalia and see the marginalia of others. It’s like a well-used and shared book!

I’m still trying to figure out what the acceptable response time is for email, though. How have these changes in communication changed our expectations of others’ availability?

I like having this concept of social proprioception — thanks for pointing it out! I can really feel this. I have experienced a major expansion of my sense of self through having a socially-active avatar in Second Life. I’m growing new sensors and nerve-endings with Facebook and Twitter, and equivalent corporate and external networking tools. This has led, in my case, to a number of new opportunities for joint work and value creation, and new colleagues and friends that I only could have known through new media. There is no question in my mind that this kind of networking is here to stay — the only question is how it will evolve to become a more seamless and energy-optimizing environment in the future.

Communicating about ‘what is twitter’, having only just learned of it in this paragraph. On the basis that others too may not be familiar with the technology.

My interest is precisely in the nature of this ‘added dimension to interactions’ that virtual worlds make possible. As a starting point, however, I would suggest it is problematic, at best, and a fundamental error, at worst, to use the concept of ‘presence’ to characterize the ‘feeling’ or affect obtained in Second Life social interactions. Pragmatically, it is problematic because one is using a physical metaphor to describe a decidedly non-physical phenomenon. There is a question of identity, of course – how does one identify who is speaking, etc., but the measure of a physical identity (the body of another avatar before me for example) in SL is embedded in the context of a mental negotiation with a simulation. That is, I need to interpret what the program’s simulation effects are telling me about the simulated physical aspects of the other avatar’s identity. There is no necessity, and no ethical call either, and therefore no practical reason, to imagine the presence of a sentient being. At worst, it is just wrong to imagine such a presence by analogy with what happens in the off-line world. Its way too limiting to do so, and there is so much other information crossing through your encounter that if you tried to block all that out, you would probably be missing the whole point of a complex form of communicative interaction. One must also take into account the post-structuralist argument against the metaphysics of presence. In my senior seminar on symbolic interactionism at the University of Windsor, my students and I discuss Mead’s Mind, Self and Society. We discuss Mead’s premise that vocalization in symbolic interactions is necessary to bring the subject to presence to him or herself, as a key foundation for the social construction of the mind and the self. Mead believes this because it seems natural that vocalization is an immediate sign of the presence of the speaker’s physical body. This utterance must be coming from ‘me’, and so on. In all our communications, including written and so on, we keep on constructing the self. But Derrida’s essay on differance shows that communication cannot be reduced to the model of physical speech; that text, for example, escapes the metaphysics of presence.
So, then, if you are convinced by these arguments that ‘presence’ is a loaded and inappropriate descriptor for the feeling of social interactions among avatars, what actually are good ways of describing this? I don’t know the answer fully, but we need a more complex concept of the self (Norman Denzin’s work moves in this direction) and of identity.

Virtual worlds .. text-based ones i.e. MUDs and MOOs were pre-web and I think it’s interesting how we seem to have gone from sync dominance to async and back to sync again … although I think now it is a lot more complex. We typical use for and text chat at the same time, twitter is perhaps a sort of overlap between sync and async … boundaries are more blurred and more fluid and we are becoming more versatile and fluent with multi-modal, multi-channel communication and weaving sync and asynch into an almost seamless, dispersed/distributed thread … communication as ‘small bytes loosely connected’ perhaps?

sorry .. that should have read “We typically use sync voice and chat … “

The notion of a ‘feeling of presence’ of, for example, an avatar’s body, should be a matter for deconstruction and critique, lest our concepts of online bodies be held back by outdated analogies from the off-line world.