What constitutes a real conversation, and can you have one online?
I’ve been thinking about that little “Twitter in Plain English” video on the Twitter home page. You know- real life happens between blog posts and emails, and that’s why you should tweet?? When does “real life” happen? More to the point for this post, what conversations matter? And why would you engage in conversation on a social network instead of in person, and on what kind of social network, and why?
A real conversation is surely some function of focus, time and attention (that formula is credited to the wonderful Dev Pathik, in his upcoming book.) Probably should have some amount of interactivity.
Here are some types of conversations I’ve had recently:
- Deep and Meaningful: 3 hours of uninterrupted dinner talk with Anne Mai, or with John on the etiquette of dojos and why it matters to his culture
- Group Casual: Sitting at table withKristin Klostermann, Hossein Farmani and Allegra Wilde- a little too loud, but still long and inclusive of some depth.
- Exploratory and Brainstorming: working with Chip on our business plan.
- Receiving a message: Muata Rasuli talked for 45 minutes about choosing your thoughts.
- Teaching: Email instructions on how and why to use Social Media
- Conversations with Paper: I’m reading Spinoza and that takes concentration- it’s like having a conversation with a dead man- he’s not talking back- but it’s still an interaction between his thoughts and mine.
- Engaging and healing: Our son’s best conversation in recent memory was 55 minutes long, in person, and on a meaningful subject where he was helping someone out.
- Conversations with Spirit: Meditating and Listening
There are more, of course.
But in the online world, where so much is telegraphic, snapshots- can you have a real conversation at all?
Or does the form exclude big swathes of content?
“Conversations can’t be had via smoke signals”
I like Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan’s observations, and have been thinking about how they apply to Social Media.
From Wikipedia, here’s a good summary on Postman:
“Postman describe how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in how information is processed and prioritized. He also argues that different media are appropriate for different kinds of knowledge. The faculties necessary to sustain rational inquiry simply are not normally encouraged by televised viewing. Reading, a prime example cited by Postman, is a subject of intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive and dialectical, unlike television which limits involvement to passivity. Moreover, as television is programmed for maximum ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its present state, he says, cannot sustain any of the conditions needed for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.
He also repeatedly states that the eighteenth century was the pinnacle for rational argument, truly being the Age of Reason. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. A striking example Postman gives: that the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully-chosen soundbites.”
Marshall McLuhan used the following 4 questions to understand the impact of any emerging Medium.
- What does the medium enhance?
- What does the medium make obsolete?
- What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
- What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?
How can you frame current hot media, eg microblogs like twitter, to mass networks like Facebook, to niche or hyper focused networks, using these questions?
What conclusions would you draw?