my not-so-barbaric yawlp

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?

Twitter has brought another level of questions to this as we begin to explore what “Duncan” above noted is essentially a UDP broadcast message.

• 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.