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From: kenn@intrbas.uucp (Kenneth G. Goutal)
Newsgroups: comp.groupware
Subject: Re: The psychological effects of flaming and laugh tracks
Summary: The resurrection of the written word may be ephemeral
Message-ID: <126@intrbas.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jan 91 22:18:40 GMT
References: <214@buster.ddmi.com> <115@intrbas.UUCP> <20815@crg5.UUCP>
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In article <20815@crg5.UUCP> szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo) writes:
>Those who recoil at the written word, and insist on touchie-feelie, 
>shallow communications, feel threatened now that e-mail and news have
>arisen to counter the trend towards sound and video.

Careful!  Touchie-feelie can be shallow, but isn't necessarily so.
Similarly, I've seen tons of traffic on the net that was quite shallow.

>So sorry for sensitives.  

I hope you mean that.  Actually, I hope they think you do.  ;-)

>Sound and video often carry more emotional
>baggage than necessary (what net-literates refer to as a low signal-noise
>ratio).  E-mail is becoming such an integral part of many organizations, 
>due to its queueing and high information/bandwidth ratio, that written 
>literacy, as opposed to the "body language literacy" popular in previous 
>years, is now re-emerging as the predominant business skill.  That puts 
>psychologists out of business and writers back in business.  Which is
>the way a healthy culture should work.

Don't get your hopes up.  I thought this too, until I realized that as
network bandwidth goes up, work, fluff, and other goodies will expand
to fill it.  On the one hand, people will start sending more diagrams
charts, pictures, what-have-you expressed as bitmaps or PostScript or
whatever, which will increase the information content enormously.  At
the same time, people will start sending pictures of themselves, or
sending voice, or even full-motion video, over the net.  Heck, using
UUCP for voice mail isn't technically outrageous even now.  As connectivity
goes up (as I am convinced that it will), real-time text, graphics, voice,
and finally video will become more commonplace.  And folks like me,
who *depend* on the time delays in the current environment, will be the
losers.  Similarly, those who *depend* on the potentially low body-
language ratio will also lose.


-- Kenn Goutal
...!linus!intrbas!kenn
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