I’ll stay away from inviting anyone to a face to face meeting to discuss whether or not Jeff did the correct thing in posting the twitter…
But as a matter of documentation, I use email as my primary tool for communication with my contractors. They have a convenient way of “forgetting” that they said something or agreed to something. And since none of them will write it down, I will avoid face to face meetings and send email. If I must meet with them f2f, I will followup with an email documenting our conversations.
I would much rather have a personal f2f to experience the conversation and read all the non-verbal cues, but without a documentation trail, I would be up a creek.
Amazing how much faster you get a response when you say, “wait a minute, in the email dated 11/25 you said ‘We will be implementing the new security features.’… What changed?” Hard to back out when you can produce time/date stamped documentation and not just handwritten notes.
Clearly, knowing the limitations of the medium you’re trying to communicate in is necessary, but I think it’s wrong to suggest that they fall into a tidy hierarchy, of any kind. Yes, face-to-face communication provides more feedback of the kind that prevents you from taking jokes as sincere (and insulting) statements, but the same feedback can also ramp up emotional issues. Nothing can make you quite as angry as an actual face-to-face argument, at least for me.
Written communication takes more work to craft in the simple cases, such as an ordinary conversation, but also provides more opportunities to craft well. We still turn to essays and books when we really need to get a point across most carefully.
I don’t think, IM, cell phone text messages, Face-to-Face or Email are generally interchangeable.
Face-to-Face is great, if the matter to discuss is not yet well-defined, and for collectively approach a definition. It is bad, if you need something written down as a result, be it for the “i said it”-kind of situation, or a “to-do”-List.
Email/Forum is good, if the matter is well-defined, but there are some complicated Points. One is able to think a long time to come to a decision, and say exactly this, precisely, with sources. (And of course you have a proof, if you need one).
I think, it’s not about escalating by importance (to me implied by “hierarchy” or “communications A-Bomb”), its more about the fitting tool for the Problem.
“Did Jeff sell the communication that he put on this blog? Were you charged money by Jeff for viewing it? If not, then your argument seems pointless.”
Well, that wasn’t really my point, although Jeff does sell ad space.
My question was against the metaphor. It also wasn’t an argument.
Just because something happens in a public place, does that mean you have the right to publicize it? This isn’t black and white. Where I live, you can’t take pictures of people out in public and publish them without permission, even though they were in a “public place”, doubly so if it presents the people involved in a negative way.
Now, I recognize that once something’s out on the Internet, it can be very hard to kill, but I find it an interesting ethical, or at least etiquette, discussion nonetheless.
IM is OK chatting with your buddies but when you are in a business environment either talk on the phone or face to face.
In a business environment, phone or face-to-face could be more of a distraction than a valuable form of communication. Whenever your “in the zone” solving a difficult problem, a ringing telephone or your co-worker asking a simple question can cost you on average 20-30 minutes of work, sometimes much more (even if it only takes a minute to respond). Except for issues that must be settled immedately, email is perfect as a distraction-free communication medium.
It’s interesting that IT people see face-to-face as the best or most preferable communication medium. Obviously, it dates back to prehistoric times, but for quite some time, simple letter writing was considered the “true” form of “real” conversation. I’m not sure where the shift happened back to face-to-face; perhaps IM/Email etc devalued the written word to this point where we’d rather spend 20 minutes in tangential conversation than write 300 carefully considered words.
Nope, nader is on topic. It was on his twitter stream linked in the blog post He said “Fuck Nader” so either he doesn’t want Nader to run because of the silly assumption that he loses elections for dems, so I wanted to reply to that, but too lazy to sign up for twitter
Or possibly he thinks that seat belts are a stupid idea? Either way needs to be set straight…
“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.”
You should have anonymized the conversation. The names of the people who participated in the conversation don’t add anything to your argument. And I know that I have been guilty of incorrectly using a particular medium – and sometimes I still am – though I have learned to choose the appropriate medium the hard way. My point is that I would not have liked having my conversations (even public conversations) highlighed on a much more public forum when in all likelyhood the conversation is not reflective of my typical character. I hope you go back and anonymize this particular blog and clean previous posts so one cannot easily figure out who the “offender” is.
And while I’m sure that determined people can get on Twitter and find out who participated in the conversation, anonymizing the conversation will make it much less likely that the “offender” will identified by the general public.
Public forum. No different than having a chat room conversation. If Phil and Scott would have had this conversation on two blogs would it have made it any more public? There’s no difference whatsoever if I can easily access both.
If you’re getting physically angry over a conversation like that, the problem is with you, not the medium. Slap yourself in your stupid face and take a breath. Kick yourself in the balls and cry a little. Then go back to your conversation.
There’s no difference whatsoever if I can easily access both.
Justice~!, the problem I see with your argument is that if the conversation were anonymized by Jeff, then you couldn’t easily access the conversation on Twitter.
OK, I just looked around on Twitter. In order to see a conversation, you have to be following one of the people in the conversation. It is possible to set your Twitter account such that not anyone can “follow” you. (One of the two parties in the forementioned Twitter excerpt has that restriction enabled.)
And even if you could follow someone on a conversation, it does not appear easy to find a conversation on Twitter based on the text of the conversation. This lends credance to my assertion that the conversation should have been anonymized.
It is his blog, but I’m letting him know that I, a reader for the past year and a half, am starting to question why I listen to Jeff. He used to be fairly helpful, now he’s muckraking. The comments have turned from a mix of gratitude and helpful insights into nothing more than a mid-grade tech forum.
If you like it, continue reading… I’m aware it’s his blog, but … I’m quickly losing interest.
Never ceases to amaze me how willing this community is to degrade exploratory dialog into name calling and to not have the courage to identify themselves.
@Kevin: actually, you’re wrong. I knew about this entire row between Scott and Phil two days ago and I follow neither of them. I was simply able to click on certain links. Note in my own blog yesterday I isolated one particular conversation piece of Jeff Atwood’s.
and even subscribe to an RSS feed of his twitters? Again, if Twitter isn’t public, why is there an RSS Feed of twitters?
I had a friend point me to some of the initial exchange between Scott and Phil. All I needed to do in order to read conversations was effectively connect some dots and read the “in reply to” parts of the conversation.
If I’m wrong about this, I’d love to hear the reasons why.
@Colin: If you do not like reading the blog, simply stop - that’s probably the easiest way. I think you are overestimating how important it is that you personally are losing interest.
He said “Fuck Nader” so either he doesn’t want Nader to run because of the silly assumption that he loses elections for dems, so I wanted to reply to that, but too lazy to sign up for twitter 