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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
In the beginning, we could only talk in person. Then, we could send letters. Eventually, we discovered electricity, and the telegraph was born. Telephony descended from the telegraph. Quite suddenly, the internet blossomed, and we were bombarded with a succession of new communication technology: email, then instant messaging. Somewhere along the way, texting was adopted on cell phones, and its spirit has been carried on by the social media platforms. With each successive development in communication technology, the barrier to communication has been reduced. It is now easier than ever to keep in touch with anyone, anywhere in the world. But I wonder whether this ease in communication has come with a price. I wonder if the quality of our conversations have an inverse relationship to the level of technology used. Part of the issue seems to lie in the inherent limitations of the medium. 140 characters in a text or a tweet is hardly enough to express one's thoughts clearly and thoroughly. It's often a cause for misunderstanding, as we labor to cram our minds into our allotment of ASCII characters. Even when given seemingly infinite time, different problems persist. The very nature of text based communication is rife to misinterpretation by the recipient. If you're like me, you've had many experiences either on online forums, or via emails and IM conversations that were riddled with misunderstanding and misinterpretation, whether it be because of our own imprecise words, or due to the parties' incongruent frames of mind. As many of you know, debates on online forums are frequently fruitless; even IM conversations between two acquaintances has proven to be inefficient and even counterproductive, at least for me. And so I seem to be paving my way towards arguing that direct, face to face conversation reigns supreme in the land of communication. While I do indeed believe that this is the preferred medium (I honestly try to avoid debates on any and all text based media), I feel that the disparity between talking and writing should be smaller than is typical today. While I'm not entirely certain why this is the case, I suspect that it may be because we generally put less thought behind our words on many of the online textual outlets, preferring instead to fire away in rapid fashion. Ready, Fire, Aim! The ease of which we can shoot our thoughts into the air means that we send them out faster, and with less meat behind them than would be the case otherwise. Perhaps that is why a proper blog entry is typically more coherent and persuasive compared to a forum post, even if the medium is technically equivalent. More thought and care goes into a block of text that we consider a blog post, compared with what we invest in a forum post, an email, or a Facebook message. In the world we live in today, perhaps it is time that the medium is the message is replaced with the medium makes the message.
Crossposted from my main blog.
 
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Without these advancements in the means of communication we wouldn't have grown economically like we have, I think. However, I do agree with you that face to face is still and probably will always be the best way of communicating.
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'The medium makes the message' is actually a slightly less radical formulation than 'the medium is the message'. Marshall Mcluhan's mentor, Harold Innis, suggested that the message is influenced by the medium, but McLuhan took it a step further.
...[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.
We're just starting to see the beginnings of the social changes that will result from the net.
McLuhan writes some really interesting stuff
Hell, nationalism and the nation state were consequences of widescale reproduceability of cheaply disseminable printed texts.
+ Show Spoiler +He wrote this in 1962. 1962! I'd say that predates 4chan by a bit.
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture
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We have more choices, and those choices are tailored to our needs. It's just more "capitalism at work." People choose the medium that best suits their needs, and if one doesn't exist, it will eventually be created. VOIP and video conferencing are good examples from recent years.
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Yeah technology is awesome. I was once talking to my friend in Australia on Skype who is halfway across the world on my iPhone while I was taking a dump
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i don't think it's that black and white.. voice conversation can be misinterpreted extremly easy as well. Not as easy as text because you get facial expressions (unless it's via phone) and voice pitch as additional informations, but it's still very easy to misunderstand things.
Text communication on the other hand allows you to quickly read up on something, that was said a few minutes ago, without having to ask back every time. And it is very multi / side tasking supportive because the acceptance towards slow replies is higher. Also, text conversation can make saying some things easier because you are less afraid of immediately being "replied" to with some unpleasant body language and having to deal with backlash (for a widely considered bad example, cf ending a relationship via text).
So, depending on what your main goal of a conversation is (for instance inform someone of a date and time versus explaining a conceptual idea), texting is actually superior in some cases. But i agree that actual talking usually is more effective.
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On March 16 2012 01:31 EternaLLegacy wrote:
We have more choices, and those choices are tailored to our needs. It's just more "capitalism at work." People choose the medium that best suits their needs, and if one doesn't exist, it will eventually be created. VOIP and video conferencing are good examples from recent years.
We have all the technology needed to make a single portable device that streams music, TV, films, voice-calls, text, internet, files and video. Yet you cannot just buy one off of the shelf and you must jailbreak, hack and do your own coding to get something like that into existence, as well as subscribe to fifty different fragmented service providers or pirate, because of dated objections by copyright holders. People would choose that but they aren't being given that choice.
So I don't think such progress is inevitable. We are held back by the media companies, not by what can be made or "what people want".
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On March 16 2012 01:52 Soleron wrote:Show nested quote +On March 16 2012 01:31 EternaLLegacy wrote:
We have more choices, and those choices are tailored to our needs. It's just more "capitalism at work." People choose the medium that best suits their needs, and if one doesn't exist, it will eventually be created. VOIP and video conferencing are good examples from recent years. We have all the technology needed to make a single portable device that streams music, TV, films, voice-calls, text, internet, files and video. Yet you cannot just buy one off of the shelf and you must jailbreak, hack and do your own coding to get something like that into existence, as well as subscribe to fifty different fragmented service providers or pirate, because of dated objections by copyright holders. People would choose that but they aren't being given that choice. So I don't think such progress is inevitable. We are held back by the media companies, not by what can be made or "what people want".
I'm pretty sure my current smartphone, a non-hacked Sony Ericsson Ray can do all those things listed. I can use Deezer, Last,fm, Grooveshark or Music Unlimited, I can watch Al-Jazeera or RTE1 (national station in Ireland), I can stick a DVD rip of Bad Ass on my SD card ez pz, voice calls is a given, text as well, internet browsing is extremely easy. I can manage my files either using Dropbox or Google Docs and once again, I can just put whatever video I want on my SD card as long as its in a reasonable format.
And I am reasonably confident that my laptop can do everything you have listed as well in with vanilla Win7 Home.
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The problem with technology isn't that it's written- it's that you don't know how to write.
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On March 16 2012 01:10 thedeadhaji wrote:
In the world we live in today, perhaps it is time that the medium is the message is replaced with the medium makes the message.
Could you expand more on this? To be honest, I don't see how the meaning of those two statements is significantly different, and what you're describing seems to be like exactly what 'The medium is the message' tries to convey.
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I would just like to propose the idea that written communication can be even more clear than spoken word due to the ability to edit and re-write what you've written. before making it public, this can help prevent misunderstandings and allow idea to be expressed fully and without interruption.
reading well formatted text can also help aid the understanding of readers as opposed to spoken word.
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Another cool read deadhaji : ) I have always had this thought in my head about what if texting first came out and then years later phone calls came out. Do you think that the younger generations would be calling alot more then texting?? I found that today alot of young people hate calling people and getting calls. Personally i hate texting... but I seem to be the only one ha.
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Don't fool yourself into believing, that fragmented communication is a step down the ladder.
Technology has changed the way we communicate and interact, no doubt.
But the alternative is slower/lesser/zero communication.
It may be more fragmented these days, but it gives us so much more flexibility. And it's not like you can't write a book or have a conversation any more, just because all these different "new" ways of communication pop up every once in a while.
+ Show Spoiler +I wrote my BA final paper/assignment whatever it's called in mediated communication. I'm down with McLuhan, Meyrowitz and all those scoundrels.
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Automation leads to anonymity, laziness, ect. The more that things other than ourselves aid us in communication, the more we are so aided, and so the more that things think or work for us, the less we need to bother think and/or know how to do. With less of ourselves needed to authenticate our communication, the greater our anonymity becomes, and with both factors, the less personal (and unless they design a medium that sends information through our voice in a hologram that mimics our facial expressions perfectly) and less informative our communication becomes as well.
Ghandi had an a similar take on this, and I generally agree with his opinion to an extent. I'm sure as soon as we learn an algorithm for perfect grammar translation, we'll have an option for changing language as fast as we can have our words spell-checked for us. I'd go on, but I would hate to derail your blog, you write such nice topics 
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Kentor
United States5784 Posts
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This is why I like skype and webcasts so much. They have all the convenience we love in digital media, with none of the limitations. Seriously though, how could we expect something like text to replace face-to-face communication (though it is, in many areas of society)? What took nature a crazy quantity of particles to replicate in the expression of a human face cannot so easily be replicated in 140 characters or less - and when we try it's too easy to see the text and forget the person who wrote it, it leaves a space where humans are driven to treat each other as some nebulous online "other" - and that's why the internet makes people jerks.
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On March 16 2012 01:52 Soleron wrote:Show nested quote +On March 16 2012 01:31 EternaLLegacy wrote:
We have more choices, and those choices are tailored to our needs. It's just more "capitalism at work." People choose the medium that best suits their needs, and if one doesn't exist, it will eventually be created. VOIP and video conferencing are good examples from recent years. We have all the technology needed to make a single portable device that streams music, TV, films, voice-calls, text, internet, files and video. Yet you cannot just buy one off of the shelf and you must jailbreak, hack and do your own coding to get something like that into existence, as well as subscribe to fifty different fragmented service providers or pirate, because of dated objections by copyright holders. People would choose that but they aren't being given that choice. So I don't think such progress is inevitable. We are held back by the media companies, not by what can be made or "what people want".
Media companies don't enforce copyrights. Governments do.
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
On March 16 2012 06:58 Kentor wrote:
Your name's Kenneth???
middle name.
(also, thanks for everyone's great comments. Hoping to get around to replying to them tomorrow morning)
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EPT
