Tuesday 6 October 2009

Watch the Wave



Right so first up my invite from Graeme hasn't arrived yet, but then according to @Twephanie it's going to take some time to come through which means Graeme will have to keep on waving at himself for a little while.




However I'm going to start moaning about it already. One of the key features that the development team are pushing is the ability for correspondents to see each others typing in real time.

Cool you may think, but why. How many times have you written and rewritten an email response, or written in haste and thought again or written an email and then changed your mind. Many times I'd suspect and in most of those cases you probably wouldn't have wanted the intended recipient to have seen what you were writing so far not so good.




However my key issue with this functionality and something I posted about on Amelia's blog is it effectively replicates and promotes one of the worst aspects of human communication i.e. that of not listening to what i being said and therefore anticipating what is being said and responding. Online social communications are all about listening, they're about understanding and responding accordingly. Although our browsing behaviour has become increasingly snack like we don't want it to progress to poorly communicative anticipatory otherwise what's the point. Realtime communication while it sounds like the future and may well be, may not be a great leap forward.

No comments:

Post a Comment