Communication Means: So Many Choices
I’ve decided I dislike using Twitter as a replacement for Chat. Chat’s TCP. I liked Twitter for being UDP. – James Duncan Davidson
I spend the majority of my day communicating with people. Whether it’s email, SMS, Twitter, face-to-face, IM, or telephone, I’m constantly communicating with people. I’ve made a career out of getting to know people. Very few of my jobs have ever been away from people (and let me tell you, I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life).
Living in Germany and having moved quite a bit, I began to rely on good ol’ pen-and-paper mail (snail mail) during my school years. When we moved overseas the military let us send mail for free within the military system. We would meet new friends on retreats, and events we attended and begin mailing back and forth. The big lesson I remember learning centered around the idea that what you write cannot be deleted. Say the things you want to say clearly and think about them first because they cannot be erased (and you didn’t want a bunch of scratch-out marks on your letter).
I was introduced to email very early. Thanks to attending a well-funded high school we were able to install a local network and give everyone in school an email address (just about the time the 486 came out … we were cutting edge at the time). Once I learned to type I learned another important lesson. The idea of ‘thinking before you send’ became more important. The better I became at typing, the closer an email was to a stream of consciousness. This got me into more than one argument.
I remember when I got my first job that was phone-based and thinking about how much the dynamics of my conversations had changed, because I now did not have body language and hand signals to rely on in order to help me communicate. I had to rely completely on my voice, playing with pitch, inflection and speed in order to help me make some of my points. Eventually I was able to master it, and excel at it, but not without hitting some rough spots along the way.
Now I have a hundred options in front of me when it comes to communicating. Recently things like twitter, SMS, email on my phone and IM have me thinking. There are so many new dynamics that have been introduced into conversations. So far I have more questions than answers, but in asking the questions at least you can begin working on them. Things like:- How do you know when an SMS conversation is finished?
- When do you assume there is a technical problem and something wasn’t received
- When is each medium more appropriate than the other?
- What if a conversation was started in one medium, is it rude to switch to another?
- When is it appropriate to continue a thread that seems like it should be a conversation between a limited number of people.
- Is it rude to take it offline?
- Is it rude to announce something intended for a limited number of people if you know they are listening?
Just some of the many questions I’ve been thinking about lately in the question of communication, the medium, and the rules, idioms, and conventions used in them.
These are great questions, and ones I think a lot of people are grappling with. It is an evolving realm of etiquette, to be sure.
One thought I have on it is that the more “informal” a channel is, the harder it is to cross a line and “be rude”. Similarly, an evolving nature makes unintended rudeness much more forgivable. Still, for example, I personally try and switch to direct messages in Twitter when my reply isn’t UDP in nature or “of general follower interest.”
My take on switching channels is that its fine to do, and maybe better if the switch is explicit. Furthermore, I think if the medium is “presence-aware” or synchronous, like chat, then switching medium to email
-being asynchronous- is natural if the other ‘TCP node’ goes offline.I’m sure I’ve had some etiquette faux pas, and will have more, but I’ll continue to try to have good manners as the communication mediums multiply.
Yes!
There are a lot of fascinating UI/etiquette questions which arise because of the constant influx of person-to-person media; a good subject to address.
Very interesting thoughts!
Here’s another converstaion dynamic that occurred to me – when one form of conversation pre-empts another – do you allow one to pre-empt another? Or is that rude? And if you do, how and when do you switch back?
I have noticed this phonomenon more with the advent of SMS text messages, it’s not a new thing.
Have you ever been at a store, you are getting ready to check out, and the store’s telephone rings. The employee probably doesn’t have much of a choice but to answer the phone, do they? Maybe the person calling just wants to ask “how late is the store open this evening?” Or maybe the person on the phone has a lot of lengthy, in-depth questions. And you are left standing there waiting to check out because now the employee can’t seem to get off the phone with the chatty person. So you wait.
Which is more rude? Is it rude to the customer standing the store to talk on the phone while they wait? Or is it more rude to the caller to let the phone keep ringing and nobody answers?
But what’s the protocol if you’re sitting talking to a friend and your cell phone rings? Caller ID helps you decide whether to answer or not. But even if you know who is calling, you don’t really know the importance of that interruption until you answer the phone.
What if you’re at dinner with a friend and you get a text message? At least know what the text conversation is going to be about. And at first it seems like text messaging would be less of an interruption than a phone call. Texts are quick to read, but responses can take awhile to type. And sometimes the text conversation can go back and forth a few times. But maybe the text conversation is important too. And maybe that gets to what Joe was talking about: we need to know when it’s appropriate to switch protocols from text to some other communication form.
Whether you’re the store employee and receive a call at the store, or the one talking with a friend and get a cell phone call, you know that you cannot carry on both conversations – you have to pick one. You can tell the person on the phone to hold, or call them back. Or if you need to take the phone call you can excuse yourself from the in-person conversation.
When any text-based conversation (SMS or IM) is involved I think we have this sense that we can carry on more than one conversation at once. But you may not be giving either one your full attention. Is that a big deal? What’s the etiquette rule there?
I was out the other day and my friends and I were observing a guy at the bar talking to a girl. Initially her body language suggested that she was interested in the guy: she was turned sideways in her seat facing him and they were talking. Later on, her shoulders squared off where she was facing the bar and no longer facing the guy. Eventually she was texting on her phone and not paying a lot of attention to him, though he was still paying attention to her.
I imagine that most people who are into text messaging a lot have been in the shoes of the person who is texting instead of talking to the people next to them, right? Come on, be honest! :) After observing the girl and guy at the bar I wondered: What kind of message does it send to the person you’re talking to in person if you’re sitting there texting? Have you been the person in the other shoes watching someone else send texts? How does it feel? Does it even matter? Or is it just acceptable and nobody cares because texting is such commonplace these days?
My opinion is I don’t really get into texting myself, but don’t mind sitting with someone who sends the occasional text. But if for some reason their text conversation needs to switch forms, I agree with what Kevin said above, that as long as it’s an explicit switch it works better.
We’re all learning here. It’s a cool thing to discuss. Just think that telephone etiquette was a brand new thing at some point in history, too!