Re: And now from NewInGo - something about Go!

To,
Thanks for those two links. I enjoyed Daniel Enemark's article a
lot.

Your post...
who knows. i have seen an interesting reference on /. about
misunderstandings coming from the fact that humans communicate not only
trough simple text but trough body language etc and even simple text
taken out of context can be made meaning completly different things. I
always thought that is obvious but then even if it is, I still find
myself surprised by what I wrote yesterday.<<
...comments on that aspect of communication that is so intrinsic a
part of our intercourse that though we can talk about it, as we are
doing, trying to pin it down like a butterfly, we can't; it's almost
extrinsic in that we've never had to 'attend' to it, just as we don't to
our breathing. But now, in this electronic world we have to learn to pay
it attention.
Any, 'cup-half-empty' approach to this medium tends to defeat its
potential. The 'half-full' way on the other hand will teach another
level of communion.
Like a child learning to read, offered all the time needed to
progress slowly from word to word, forging the link between those
strange black marks and the spoken word, is what we've all been doing
since the Internet spread the boon of email - warring egos allowing.

In Mr Enemark's piece he says,...
...We know e-mail arrives as soon as we send it, so we feel we should
write it quickly, too. On the other hand, letters depend on postal
timetables. A letter writer feels he has a bigger window of time to
think and write.<<
...in this regard email has defeated me.
I cannot tolerate the dominance of the instantaneous pop-up
message-arrival notifications. Those I see as the Achille's heel of
email; if you like they connive at impairing that 'attention learning'.
To such an extent is this the case that I always use an Off Line Reader
- only having dipped my toe into the pop-up pond for day or so. Only
then, via an OLR and blinking-times of *my* choosing for sending _and_
receiving can there be any real control of that 'attention' thing.
Which last is of course the essence of communication and I'm not
saying that others cannot manage pop-up-email perfectly well.
/{Pause for Commercial: the excellent OLR that I've used since
early in the nineties is 'Virtual Access' - the text driven}/

On those 'black marks' on pages, the sort most used in rgg. By
definition we all understand what they 'say'. Their 'p' 'b' 'g' 'e'
etc., sounds hold no fear for us as on their being 'read' they 'sound'
in our head /{that idea could start a whole new thread<s>}/. Accepting
the idea as stated the internet and email has made me more aware than at
any time in my time of the whole range of 'different' black marks from
Cyrillic to Kanji et al that do not sound in *my* head but do in others.
Marks that are now widely accessible.
It's a bit like music. My only connection to that great art other
than appreciation, is that I can sing reasonably near in tune - but
that's it. Music's black-marks do not 'sound' when I look at a page full
of staff-bars and notes. Yet that too is now more accessible than ever.
There are even applications such as 'Sibelius' that will play these
particular black-marks 'back-atcha' to quote Colonel O'Neill. Sibelius
will even do this to selection of such marks that you randomly plonk
onto its monitor image of a page of staff-bars. You have to wonder if
Beethoven or Mozart or Puccini would have welcomed a licensed copy of
Sibelius.

Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes
relationships fragile in the face of conflict.<<
On this aspect of the Enemark piece; I've a disagreement of sorts.
It misses the point; again and as always due to the 'collectives' that
we try to inhabit, everything, well, let's say so very much of what we
do and think is done and thought from groupings.
I don't think with any others' brains and they - lucky folk - don't
get to do so with mine; even if, heaven forfend, I was willing to let
them do so. Telepathy? Finger-down-the-throat time.
That for me is the core of the human 'collective' condition. We
sensibly, surround ourselves with institutions of every colour, faith
and purpose to bridge this essentially unbridgeable barrier.
We've got; the family, which I'd say is the best of them; schools;
universities; 'guilds', for all the community-needed skills; the myriad
religions that have been put together over the last fifty thousand years
(apparently the 'ability' of our brains has varied little over that
time, ergo...) et cetera. But the bottom lines are, 1) you're alive, 2)
you're sane 3) you're healthy. These measures are the only ones that
need to pertain for each individual thinker. So why should it be so
difficult to communicate on the email unless of course, you have a
penchant for that disease, dominating others. This last of course can
only be done with the co-operation of lots of others who persuade
themselves or have been persuaded to do the bidding of some body of
coercers. Which last is the flaw in this whole argument as so many are
perfectly happy to be so used. Fear and guilt being is readily fusible
into minds that are then wholly melded into this, or that, or the other
grouping.


In effect, e-mail cannot adequately convey emotion.<<
I don't disagree with that and home-in on the 'adequately' word;
and those, 'words', are what email passes around so quickly and
accurately.
The emotion is that generated by the words in that isolated
thinker-unit lodged between the ears; each of which units will 'paint' a
different sort of picture from them to emote upon.
Nothing wrong with that and its only stumbling block is that it's
being done between folk who as Enemark says might not ever have met up.
Their. 'music' is played with language and even when it's that same
language, as used, it might not sing the same tune to someone else.
All of that is in the long run to the great benefit of the millions
of internet users in their learning to use email.
All we have to do is try and keep all the coloured, flashing and
sliding webpage pictures under control while we think; those I'm coming
to loathe, those and tv commercial drivel.

To avoid miscommunication, e-mailers need to look at what they write
from the recipient's perspective, Epley says. <<
How does Homer Simpson put it? Duh!
/{old Homey, the filaw-sofa is getting himself quite a following;
another grouping is born]/

Harry.

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