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Evolution of Communication Response

Published June 4th, 2007 in Tech & VC

Alex Iskold wrote an excellent piece on the evolution of communication last week at Read/Write Web. He lists a series of interesting juxtapositions of means of communication. For example, he sees Email as a faster and compact evolution of snail mail, and blogs an evolution from newspapers. Makes sense, and it’s quite insightful.

I wanted to comment on how IM/Twitter fits into the picture. IM was created originally as a way for people logged into a terminal to communicate with each other. But, it was popularized as a way to take conversations out of a chatroom (like IRC or AOL) into a private setting. As such, IM and chatrooms are integrally tied, and though chatrooms did not directly spawn IM, I see IM as a natural evolution of chatrooms. IMs real value to a broad audience of PC users was not obvious until chatrooms were popularized.

The relationship between chatrooms and IM is especially relevant in their respective attention models. Chatrooms are more demanding on time and attention than IM. To be involved in a chat, you need to read the past history of what people are saying upon entering the room to understand context. Then, once engaged, you need to remain logged into the chatroom and use partial attention to monitor the conversation for relevancy. IM is more lightweight by comparison. In IM, conversations are rarely a continuation, so there’s no investment of time to “catch up” with what has been said. Furthermore, there is no continual drain on attention; being logged in is a passive engagement.

Based on this comparison of attention models, I might pose the following SAT analogy…

Chatrooms : IM :: Blogging : Twitter

Blogging is more demanding on attention for me. When I write a blog post, I have to think about how it fits into the larger conversation of what other people are saying and the history of related memes. Blogging on a particular subject often requires constant partial attention to monitor the conversation and engage using comments or posts when relevant. By contrast, Twitter is more lightweight on attention. I can whip off a tweet from an elevator if I feel the impulse, and it doesn’t necessitate thinking about how it affects a larger conversation. There’s satisfaction in its simplicity. Monitoring Twitter more passive than monitoring the blogosphere. Since the posts are more carefree, it’s ok to miss a few hours (or days). You can feel satisfied seeing the top 20 most recent tweets the next time you hit the site to write a tweet of your own. And, any tweets that really require your direct attention (like direct messages) will notify you via the method you choose (SMS, IM, Email, etc).

Now, I don’t mean to say that Twitter is super-attention friendly. On the contrary, I waste a lot of time playing with Twitter. But, I think its a natural, more-lightweight evolution of communication out of blogging, much like the evolution of IM out of chatrooms.

4 Responses to “Evolution of Communication Response”  

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  1. 1 Alex Iskold Jun 4th, 2007 at 2:21 pm

    Hey Andrew,

    Good post and good clarification on the chat evolution.
    Re: twitter, you are looking at it from the perspective of the sender, while I was looking at it from the point of view of the receiver. In the latter case, twitter is very demanding.

    Alex

  2. 2 Terry Jones Jun 4th, 2007 at 4:37 pm

    Hi Andrew

    I don’t mean to be too picky, and I realize that you talk about “real value” and “popularized” (things which are not easily quantified, or are at least relative), but….

    You could use the UNIX write command in the early 80s, and at least amongst the undergrads studying computer science where I was, it was extremely popular. Yes, we had email too and we sent many emails every day, but we used write (and a similar command called party) to do a ton of IM’ing. There was no multi-party chatting. A few years later, we got the talk command. It split the screen and showed you character-by-character input, but was still IM. Importantly, it worked over TCP/IP so your peer didn’t have to be sitting on another terminal in your building. In about 87 I remember using a multi-party version of talk between Waterloo and Indiana. We all thought it was very cool, though a bit odd to have multiple people typing away on the same screen. The development of (client/server) TCP/IP had allowed this sort of application to be built.

    While obviously not mainstream, these tools were in wide use 20 years ago amongst people with access to machines that were multi-user and/or networked. IM was valuable several years before there was such a thing as multi-user chatting. Evolution is very concerned with gradual change, the origin of the change, etc. In this case I don’t think you can claim that IM evolved out of chatting.

    But, then again, you did say popularized… :-)

  3. 3 Andrew Parker Jun 4th, 2007 at 6:43 pm

    That’s great Terry. I appreciate the thorough history. Thanks.

  4. 4 Terry Jones Jun 4th, 2007 at 7:54 pm

    Here are a few more quick comments for you.

    I do think it’s well worth thinking along the lines you’re heading. If there is an evolution (or some sort of discernible signal in the noise), and you can pick it, well…… that’s why the world has entrepreneurs, VCs, etc.

    There has been a gradual move towards increasingly easier ways of increasingly quickly publishing increasingly smaller amounts of information. That’s a lot of increasing I know, but we live in an expanding universe.

    Email was fairly easy, but the information chunks were relatively large, and access was not so easy - you needed computational access, you needed things like UNIX, email addresses, servers, etc., and you might wait a couple of days for an answer (uucp anyone?). The web came along and people could publish using HTML, which was (and is) damned hard when you think about it (weird syntax, installing and running browsers and web servers, getting online, ftp’ing HTML files and images, etc). But many people managed it nevertheless, and of course many tools sprang up to make it simpler. Then you get blogs, and suddenly it’s much easier to publish information, and people are publishing small things and seeing the results instantly. Then comments on blogs - click and type and cross your eyes at a captcha. That’s pretty easy and, my comments notwithstanding, lots of small things are published almost instantly. There’s the rise of SMS, a beautiful example of major consequences from a technological afterthought, with billions of messages being sent, all necessarily small. Then of course you have Twitter, basically doing the same thing but with broadcast and other bits and pieces. Even smaller and easier, there’s the rise of tagging - one click, type your information, one more click and it’s published. (To some extent even just clicking on a link is publishing information: of course there’s a reason Google are now redirecting your clicks - why throw away all those micro-publishing events? You don’t get to see the publication, though if you’re lucky you may get to see a related/derived ad)

    If you consider all of these (and there are quite a few other systems that can be similarly mentioned), there’s a pronounced pattern towards ease and speed of publication and smaller size of what’s published.

    To me that’s a very provocative way to try to think about the technological world, about how it can tap in to deep-seated social behaviors and needs of we poor primates, and, of course, to try to extrapolate from. And that fits right in with your evolution of information systems thinking.

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