On Escalating Communication

blog
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I'm a big fan of Twitter. The service itself is nothing revolutionary; it's essentially public instant messaging. But don't underestimate the power of taking a previously siloed, private one-to-one communication medium and making it public. Why talk to one person when you could talk to anyone who happens to be interested in that particular topic? Granted, there are plenty of topics that should only be discussed in private. But in my experience, those are the exception, not the rule. You should always try to maximize the value of your keystrokes.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/02/on-escalating-communication.html
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An interesting time for the twitter conversation talk:

http://twitter.com/codinghorror/statuses/757351162

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Hey Now Jeff,
Some communications sure do have limitations. I’m surprised your a big fan of Twitter.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto

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Yeah, I’m with you. Back when I first joined Twitter I railed against people using it as “the most inefficient and unusable version of IRC EVER”. That’s only escalated over time, especially once Twitter formalized the @name convention.

Well, at least nobody’s figured out an efficient means of spamming Twitter. Yet.

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I’ve gotten into a few arguments with my wife because something I wrote in an email as a joke wasn’t preceived as a joke by my wife.

With any written medium, there’s no way to ensure that the reader understands what you wrote the way you intended it. With the phone or in person, you can at least tell from their body language or the way they say something whether they understand you or not.

Wish I had learned sooner, so I could had a few less arguments with my wife.

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twitter?

I hope Ralph Nader can be successful in pushing whoever is nominated to be accountable for their promises of change, but alas the media will continue to label him a “spoiler” and ignore what he represents to those who choose to vote for him out of disgust at the alternatives. Democracy is not free and the democrats aren’t gonna get a free ride out of Nader.

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The discussion in question never resorted to name calling or trollish actions, so what criteria would you use for whether a debate should move from Twitter? Is it length?

I definitely am glad you raise this point, because new forms of communications will naturally settle into new rules of etiquette for communicating in those mediums.

What I find interesting is that you yourself escalated a Twitter conversation to your blog, without even a heads-up to me offline. What is the general etiquette on that?

Sure, Twitter is technically public, but there are varying degrees of public as we learned from the first Facebook fiasco. I only have 300 or so followers in Twitter, which is where the conversation would’ve most likely stayed, but now it’s on a blog with thousands and thousands of readers.

In any case, I am still searching Amazon for my “Miss Manners on Twitter” book. :wink:

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I disagree with your hierarchy. I switch to IM when email becomes inadequate, not the other way around. I switch to email when facebook messages and text messages become inadequate.

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This clip must be old. Twitter has adjusted their feeds and you shouldn’t see a one-sided conversation anymore. If you don’t follow the target of an @name, it should be hidden from you now.

And I would argue the exact opposite needs to take place. Why rely on voice conversations that can’t be easily recorded, required synchronized, offer no ability for hyperlinking, attaching, or embedding and don’t offer a paper trail. For all of these reasons email (and to a slightly lesser degree IM) are superior. What holds us back is people’s inability to type or to learn proper etiquette, both of which should be rectified by schools, places of work, and colleagues.

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What I find interesting is that you yourself escalated a Twitter conversation to your blog, without even a heads-up to me offline. What is the general etiquette on that?

Public is public. I doubt anyone can even follow the conversation in this format, which was kind of my point. I couldn’t. It’d be better as a forum topic or-- dare I say-- a blog post?

I disagree with your hierarchy.

That’s perfectly fine. If you’re aware of the hierarchy and the pros and cons of each method, then you’re ahead of most. Put them in whatever order you like.

because something I wrote in an email as a joke wasn’t preceived as a joke by my wife.

Adding six different smiley variations didn’t work? :slight_smile: :wink: :smiley:

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One of the problems with things like IM and twitter is that you can’t easily communicate emotion and you sure can’t communicate tone or body language at all. Many a time have I offended a good freind and been offended by a good friend when it could have been resolved over a 30 second call or talk.

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LOL! Some of you dudes complaining about Atwood posting a public conversation on his blog need to grow a set of balls and stop crying like little girls. If Bellware and Haacked had a set of blog posts doing this rather than Twittering back and forth would there be as much of an issue!!

Sheesh, man up already.

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This is an actual, permanent shift (and some would argue for the worse) in social engineering.

At one office I worked at I refused (and still do) to use IM. I would sit at a co-workers desk trying to reason thru some technical details, and they were forever interrupted by little IM boxes lighting up. No train of thought!

My son recently had coffee with someone who could NOT sit and talk without using her phone to text people constantly.

Just as we lose the ability to retain coherent handwriting due to keyboards, we are losing the ability to converse – and we avoid conversing – by using email, IM, etc. instead.

What year “THX 1138”?

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There is indeed a level of privacy, if not intimacy, that informs what a twitter poster might write. I know that my circle of followers is listening. There’s an intimacy in that.

There’s nothing technically wrong, per se, with re-posting a twitter conversation on a mechanism with higher visibility because we accept the accessibility of the medium. Although the justifiability of this blog post - for me at least - feels like something akin to posting photos snapped at a public nude beach.

There’s always a risk that the conventional intimacy of a social circle will be eschewed by someone with a motive to publish its content outside of its inherent context, but the amenability of the medium to this kind of action doesn’t justify the action.

It also strikes me as a really cowardly thing to do. Phil and I had the stones to stick to this debate and have it in the open, for all it’s worth, to talk this issue through, and to provide a window into the negotiation of mean to folks in our respective circles. You added nothing, and you’re only action was parasitic.

So, you’ve got every right to regurgitate twitter conversations, but it’s only a technical right. Your moral claim to the act is spurious.

To my experience, you only seem to be interested in comfy cozy human factors, which isn’t where the paradigm-changing work is done.

You want twitter to be a certain thing and a certain way. I appreciate your feed of interesting links, etc, but twitter ins’t that one thing to everyone, and you’ve got little call to attempt to skew perceptions here to try make it so.

If you don’t like conversations on twitter, and if the folks who don’t like twitter conversations that you quoted don’t like twitter conversations, then read something else. If our negotiations of meaning are getting in the way of folks finding the next link to something funny on YouTube, well, I make no apologies whatsoever.

The realm of human factors encompasses much more than the focus of your interests in the field.

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Have to agree with Steve (for the worse) - this is like what we call Crackberries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry Some people are so addicted (or is that afflicted?) that they just can’t help themselves - must… reach… for… crack…berry ahhhhhh. So why not add yet another addiction to increase our ADD in our social networking communication. Maybe I am old school - I could never understand the functional purpose of twitter.

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I disagree with your hierarchy.

That’s perfectly fine. If you’re aware of the hierarchy and the pros and cons of each method, then you’re ahead of most. Put them in whatever order you like.

Actually, this is tangentially related to some research I’m doing.

Older people are digital immigrants and have lived most of their lives with only a few communication modes (face to face, phone, letter, word of mouth, maybe email) so they regard each mode as a seperate thing for which they have to learn the appropriate way to use.

Younger people who are digital natives grew up with their choices of communication modes constantly expanding (email, text messaging, conference calling, video conferencing, usenet, forums, blogs, poking, twittering and on and on…) so they are much more focused on building generative models from which they can derive the rules for any communication medium.

It’s this cognitive shift that makes it so hard for both sides to see the other’s mode of work. Digital natives are multimodal and shift seamlessly (if not always appropriately) between different channels and use channels based on the task at hand. Digital immigrants struggle to follow and end up making numerous social gaffes which keeps them tied down to what they already know.

Here’s something I wrote about this phenomena:

For people under a certain age, [multimodal communication] is something that’s totally natural to them and each medium is a tool used for a specific purpose. I’ll post a note on facebook about a concert, email you the link to the band’s website, instant message you to figure out where we’re going to meet up, text message to ask why you’re running late, meet up with you face to face to attend, call you up afterwards to talk about how much it rocked and then post the pictures up on my facebook profile and tag you the next day.

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More proof that Scott Bellware is a pompus jacakss, as if his blog didn’t provide enough evidence of that already.

Twitter to me seems to be the ultimate manifistation of narcacism. Do twitterers feel that the noise they generate adds value to the cloud?

Right now I’m typing.
Now I’m about to review the text of this post.
Now I’m debating the part where I call Bellware a pompus jacakass.
Now I’m deciding to leave it in.
Now I’m clicking Post.

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wow, if your twitters are exactly that. I’m glad you’re not twittering.

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Jeff… when I first started reading your blog I found it informative and helpful.

Over the past few months I have found it to be more and more trite. It’s as though you’re writing for the sake of it, placing more emphasis on controversy and less on being… helpful. What is this blog about, really? Is this going to improve people or technology on the whole?

For that matter, what is this about code not being beautiful. Who friggin’ cares? What purpose does it server to argue over such things?

For the love of (insert deity here), would you please get back to writing more pragmatic pieces and less tripe? You’re becoming the Fox News of tech blogs…

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To my experience, you only seem to be interested in comfy cozy human factors, which isn’t where the paradigm-changing work is done.

I hate to disagree, but it’s all human factors. Who do you think picks the paradigms? In a less general sense, human factors is where the most work needs to be done in computing, because right now we suck at it.

So, you’ve got every right to regurgitate twitter conversations, but it’s only a technical right. Your moral claim to the act is spurious.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you want to claim any sort of control over the “privacy”, or format, or context, of your communications, don’t put them on the freakin’ web. The web works by making connections. His “moral claim” isn’t spurious, it’s fundamental.

OK, I’ll confess I was lying when I said I hate to disagree. In this case it’s more of a compulsion.