Public Blackboard, Charlottesville, VA

How much of your day do you spend communicating with people in some way?

Has it always been that way? Before radio, TV, telephones, the telegraph, email, mobile telephones and the variety of online communication tools, how much time did people spend communicating? Is the nature of our communications different? Has the QUANTITY increased? Has the QUALITY suffered?

Everyday our conversations splinter by people, time, location, social context. Think of what happens everyday: we start talking to people, get interrupted, forget to say something, forget to respond, can’t say something because of where we are or the people around us, don’t have enough time to talk and/or listen. We tell varying degrees of the truth. We communicate directly to people, we share ideas with the masses.

Instead of helping to solve the natural problem of communication that is called “being human”, online communication tools have only added to the complexity. Discontinuous. Fractured. Lack of context. Asynchronous communications scatter across our various inboxes, comments litter the web, incomplete conversations are lost amid the noise. Group conversations evolve, devolve, tune people out as the meanings and topics change, change from private to public to private.

Standards and expectations change, evolving drastically and subtly as technology creates new opportunities and responsibilities. How and what do we keep private? How quick do we expect responses? What do different forms or methods that we use say about us, about our relationship with the people we are talking to?

And where do we go to talk? Our conversations reside in bits and pieces, owned in discrete parcels by different people and platforms, unaggregated and unknown.

We participate in one side of the conversation, not listening or being able to completely listen or respond to the other side.

The web has made it easier to publish our ideas, but it has made it harder to listen to others’ ideas.

I’m not the only one thinking about the fractured state of online communications [one of many permutations of this thought].

VC Fred Wilson identified the problem awhile ago, and earlier this year invested in one attempt to combine blog conversations, blog comment platform Disqus. [1]

Social media has provided us a plethora of tools, devices, methods and new standards for communicating. We know these tools: they have infiltrated our personal and professional lives, changed the ways we live and interact. But we are still at the very early stages of learning how to use them.

I’m looking forward to seeing how we get better. Hopefully I’ll be able to help.

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On that note, this weekend I am going to SocDevCamp East in Baltimore, a BarCamp-event focused on the social web. Looking forward to seeing where the thoughts and energy is headed.

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[1] I use Disqus to power the comments for this blog.