Thinking about the dynamics of communication technology and what it does to communication lately… it’s odd, I use my computer to trade information with the world in so many ways, e-mail, news-mail, news pages, msn, and now blogging. But I wonder how these new kinds of communication have changed the way I relate to people. I have friends that I talk to more because they’re on msn and we just happen to “run into” each other online, and I have people whose emails I’ve had for years but we rarely even say hello.
I think a part of the general confusion, or disconnect I feel has to do with how I’m actually communicating with people now. When we talk in person we can read so much: posture, facial expression, tone, tempo, inflection; and we have a unique rhythm of turn-taking that makes for dialogue. But in these new media all of those are thrown into confusion. If my friend is online and she doesn’t say hi is she ignoring me? If I’m in a hurry and can’t talk will you think I don’t want to talk?
We’ll never know, unelss we talk about the way we talk. But then it gets into this oddly uncomfortable meta-dialogue on talking about talking that seems to diminish the overall experience. But it’s exactly that kind of discussion that helps us understand why people do the things they do. Without communicating about communicating how will we ever know what’s being said?
The problem, then, is one of whether or not there are social norms, or rules, about the way certain kinds of converstion happen in certain media. But it’s all so new that these norms are all just being developed in the haphazard way that any new social convention is built. So we stumble about wondering if someone’s “brb” (be right back) on an instant message is a brush-off or a bathroom break, or a sick grandmother on the phone. And what if your mood changes from one conversation to another, not because of what you think of the person, but because your mood, or health, or level of distraction changed.
These are all things that seem somehow, at least for the time being, easier to understand in the physical presence of someone, but then again we have learning to do there, too. So how do we work these new tools into our pre-existing social structure?
-joel