:
“All the communication technologies we use —
telephones, newspapers, radio, IM, e-mail, mailing lists, TV, books
— are mired in historical cruft that keeps us from seeing clearly
what to build next. It is useful to go to first principles, then
reexamine whatever communication task you have at hand. So let me
suggest the following basic dimensions of
communication:”
somewhat relatedly in an obtuse kind of way, is
steven johnson’s write-up
on carrying on two simultaneous group conversations with the same
group:
“There’s wi-fi in the room, and as people talk and give
informal presentations, there’s a simultaneous chat going on,
restricted solely to the people in the room. The chat is being
projected onto a flat screen visible to everyone, so the ten people
or so who aren’t participating in it can follow the threads as
well.”“It was a pretty intoxicating mix — carrying on two simultaneous
group conversations with the same group. You felt like you were
pulling down a lot of data: the real-world conversations grounded
things, and the chat let the room riff a bit more. But also
intoxicating in the dizzying sense. There are a number of cog-sci
studies of our ability to follow two verbal conversations at once
(we max out above two), but I wonder if the carrying capacity is
any different if one conversation is spoken and one is
text.”
via
werblog
]