Republishing someone else's post is like using someone else'e toothbrush. But every now and then, you find one that really does a good job of articulating broad cultural shifts better than you can paraphrase or pretend to have written. And here's one like that. The original article is here. But here goes:
"We
barely have time to pause and reflect these days on how far
communications technology has progressed. Without even taking a deep
breath, we've transitioned from email to chat to blogs to social
networks and more recently to Twitter. Here is my representation of the
current ecosystem, which we will explore in this post:
In a recent post
,
Fred Wilson asked what is going to trump email? (implying that even
email is getting old). Certainly email is still the most broadly used
form of digital communication, particularly in businesses, but is it
beginning to be displaced? And more importantly why?
To
answer these questions, we need to understand the patterns behind all
forms of digital communication. How they came about and why; and what
are the differences between them. Perhaps going back and looking at
regular mail, phone and newspapers can give us insights into the
reasons and potential life-span of email, chat and Twitter.
Email vs. Mail
It
is always useful to start at the beginning and understand the basics.
How is email different from the regular mail? The obvious differences
are that email is faster and virtual (i.e. not physical). And it has
different economics, since you do not have to pay per email message (at
least we do not perceive it this way). Now, because email is delivered
faster, we send more of it. Because we send more of it, each message is
much smaller than a typical letter. So thinking about it this way, we
realize that email not only redefined mail, it created a completely
different way of communicating. Instead of sending more information
less often, we send less information more often. The speed and quantity of communication created a qualitatively different communication medium.
Phone vs. Chat
Way
before we had the Internet, we already had a way to communicate faster
then via mail - the telephone. Phones allowed us to instantly get in
touch. Then when the world went online, Instant Messaging was invented
- which, unlike email, allowed people to reach each other immediately.
But there are big differences between phone and chat. Firstly, most of
us, at least initially, were not as good at typing as talking. Even
today, conversations via chat do not have the same flow as a phone
call, because people have learned to multi task during chat. That is
not something that you would typically do on a phone call (unless you
are on a really boring corporate call!). Despite the differences, the
key common attribute between a phone call and an instant message is
essentially immediate reach-ability.
Extreme multi-tasking; pic by defining moment
Newspaper vs. Blogs
Regular
mail and phone are typically used for one-on-one communication.
Newspapers and radio are older forms of one-to-many communication.
These methods are examples of broadcast or push technologies. Over the
past decade, blogs arrived on the scene and they've had tremendous
success as a form of one-to-many communication. The reason for this is
that blogs leveraged something that was done very poorly in newspapers
and somewhat better in radio - our need for feedback. Blogs made feedback frictionless. Anyone can comment on a post.
The
ability for people to get involved and to express their opinions,
created a completely different dynamic. In a way, blog posts are like
mass mailings with massive CC lists - but executed in a much more
organized way. This form of non-instant communication has won our
hearts, but overwhelmed our RSS readers. And that, in turn, created an
opportunity for the micro version. Here comes Twitter.
Electrodes vs. Twitter
Twitter
is a new form of communication that is both a natural step from
blogging and a weird experiment normally found in neuroscience labs.
Because blog posts are typically lengthy, there was an opportunity to
break them down into smaller chunks. Twitter arrived on the scene and
in a way it asked us to break down all of our thoughts and actions into
succinct chunks. As the result, they can be delivered faster, processed
faster and there can be more of them. And once again, the interplay
between speed and quantity created a qualitatively different
experience. People are collaborating on Twitter in real time. They are
discovering news, watching each other and getting advice. Twitter
pushed us all to the edge of real communication. Any more real would
probably be telepathy!
The mobile twist
The
axis not reflected is reach-ability. With the
recent explosion of mobile devices, the communication game has changed
once again. While with traditional computers instant reach-ability was
not always possible, mobile devices eliminate this gap. There has been
an explosion of chatting and twittering on cell phones, proving that
real-time communication is what people crave.
The outcasts, or the way to the future?
Just
about when we cannot imagine anything that can beat the real-time
broadcast nature of Twitter, things get even more strange. The popular Justin.tv
show has a guy walking around with the camera attached to his head,
recording everything that is happening around him. While we may
question the sanity and usefulness of this, we cannot deny that we are
curious about this phenomenon. Is this an aberration or a way to the
future? The answer is not a simple no!. There is more to the story, which we are only finding out as we go along.
Conclusion
We
are witnessing a breathtaking evolution of new forms of digital
communication. More than witnessing, we are facilitating it. All of
this is unfolding so quickly that we do not have time to pause and
reflect on what is happening. But if email is becoming an endangered
species, then we need to pay attention. So the question still stands:
what really different and new forms of communication are we going to
see next?"
Ben Diggles once said, "why are all the social networks online being created by social retards?"
I don't know, but be forewarned, prom kings and queens, will the "geek inherit the earth"? or the virtual one?
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Jonathan Harris just blew off everyone's socks @ TED with a presentation of his upcoming project "Universe". He's an artist that works primarily digitally, and amongst other things, he develops programming systems that sample large quantities of data and express them in mindbending ways. Here's one example:
