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February 2, 2004
One from the Old Skool: Godwin on ASCII, from 1994
Posted by Clay Shirky
Here's Mike Godwin on video vs. text, from the 1994 Wired:
Flaming (typically defined as the posting of e-mail or public messages intended to insult or provoke) is an occupational hazard of the Net. Mere text, they'll tell you, is too narrow a communications medium for human beings - it doesn't carry body language or emotional nuance - so misunderstandings are all too probable.
Sometimes they'll even go further: When the information superhighways are all built, they say, and we're able to transmit live, full-motion video to each other, we will enter a Golden Age of Telepresence, and online misunderstandings will evaporate.
I'm here to tell you they're wrong. Wake up, online belletrists everywhere - the Golden Age is already here, and flames are the proof. The problem is not that ASCII is too restricted a medium - the problem, if anything, is that text says too much, and that the medium is too intimate! Flames are the friction born of minds rubbing too closely together.
10 years later (and 10 more years of failed predictions of video-conferencing as a mainstream tool) and this is still right. There is a coalition of people eager to sell video as the cool new technology and writing as on the way out, but as things like the spread of weblogs show us, words have a number of really good characteristics that video lacks.
Comments (5)
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1. Douglas Galbi on February 2, 2004 1:26 PM writes...
words have a number of really good characteristics that video lacks.
Well, that's true. It's also true that, from 1925 to 1995, time spent reading and writing per week has fallen from 6 to 3 hours per week per person, while time spent watching television has risen from 0 to 16 per week (these figures are time budget numbers for US adults, primary activity during discretionary time; for details see Section III of "Communications Policy, Media Development, and Convergence" at www.galbithink.org.
A wide range of evidence suggests that making sense of text requires more bodily work than making sense of audio-visual communication. See "Sense in Communication," at www.galbithink.org.
this is still right.
An apodictic style doesn't work well in text, particularly hypertext. Do you really think that the large demand for television, film, telephoning, and photography is driven by corporations eager to sell video? What evidence is there that reading and writing will attract a larger share of personal attention in the future?
Permalink to Comment2. Prentiss Riddle on February 2, 2004 3:05 PM writes...
Some doomsayers speak of our time as the beginning of a "post-literate" age, and I think your point shows how wrong they are.
And yet -- is there perhaps a large segment of the population which is indeed "post-literate"? And does the primacy of video in their lives perhaps constitute a different kind of digital divide? Will there come a time when a predictor of success in adult life is whether a kid had a blog in junior high or obsessed about tv and video games instead?
Permalink to Comment3. Jesse Reiner on February 3, 2004 3:23 PM writes...
What will come of the social software space as it evolves from static text towards the use of 'rich media' formats of sound and video? There will always be a place for text but it will live alongside the exchange of video and sound. As each of these mediums carries its own set of communicative properties, wouldn't the nature of interaction and therefore, miscommunication, change as well?
The current popular blogs on social software focus on new applications (friendster, orkut etc.) that are flat, web-based pin-up walls of textual information. What seems more compelling is how micro-media networks of the future could emerge as an outgrowth of social software. Ultimately, social software may be just a platform or tool for gathering and distributing cultural objects and amplifying the power of interpersonal communication.
Blogs seem to be just the early stages of the mass media of the coming years. Collaboratively filtered broadcast networks grown out of social software could well exist alongside the big media networks of today. I think its safe to assume text will always have an important role in a digitally networked media environment but I think its still too early in the life of the Internet as a mass medium to know how communication will change as video and audio become ubiquitous in the next 5 to 10 years.
Permalink to Comment4. Sam Kinsley on February 5, 2004 11:29 AM writes...
I agree in part with Prentiss Riddle. There probably is an extensive section of society who are "post-literate". This could be due to a primacy of video in their lives, but it is also interesting that in that time schools in the West have cut down on teaching the valuable skills of stylised writing - such as the essay, poetry and short stories - in favour of producing powerpoint presentations, see Powerpoint is Evil - Wired 11.09. Added to this, at least in the UK, is the impoverishment of the language through text (SMS) lingo, which is filtering in to the written work of the less able students.
I feel it is important to remember that we live in a privalaged, technophile bubble, where blogging is second-nature and a way of life. If you asked the population of Plymouth, in the UK where I live and study, if they know what blogging is you would mostly be met by a blank stare and a shrug of the shoulders, not only do they not know, it is also likely that they don't care, "I get my news from the TV, what do I need that [blogs] for?".
Personally, I suspect that the primary technological contact for the wider community will be mobile technologies, therefore it should be the applications and social practices that they create that we watch most carefully.
Permalink to Comment5. Eric Wright on July 1, 2004 12:28 AM writes...
My personal homepage.
Eric Wright o
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