DISQUS

Dwayne Phillips · 7 months ago

I like the structure you give to this topic. It makes it easier to understand and explain to others.

Sylvain Carle · 7 months ago

This is an interesting perspective, I like the concept of progression thru these modes.

Would it be better represented as concentric circles, with email at the center (secret) and microblog at the outside edge (public)?

Could make the perspective even stronger by also representing that these modes of interactions are complements. And it puts the openess/public sphere at the edge. I like that.

stoweboyd · 7 months ago

I don't think that email is more core than thes other tools; we are moving from one as the dominant modality toward another end of the spectrum.

Laurie Buczek · 7 months ago

Stowe- I really like the way you laid this out. Spot on.

stoweboyd · 7 months ago

Thanks.

s · 7 months ago

And additionally, 'room' and 'stream' are very off the mark if that is your differentiator.

Having Trillian for IRC open and having Twhirl for Twitter open look almost EXACTLY alike. They are both streaming.

I think you need more experience with these mediums before purporting to find a supposition and writing about them in depth.

stoweboyd · 7 months ago

That's actually humorous.

BillOdell · 7 months ago

Nice post as usual Stowe. Glad to see your making progress on your study. We posted on a similar topic highlighting the move from email to Facebook on our blog today. http://corpblog.helpstream.com/ Impeccable timing.

stoweboyd · 7 months ago

I will take a look.

mrhames · 7 months ago

I just did a blog post about how social networks needed e-mail grow. Early on, we got e-mails when we got Twitter DM's, or Facebook mail (which is also private), but now that we're used to looking for things like this, we don't need e-mail to nudge us anymore. So e-mail needs to rethink it's connection to an open world of streams. I think gmail and yahoo mail are trying, and since they have huge numbers of people in their potential communities, I'm interested to see where it goes.

e.p.c. · 7 months ago

Is there another dimension to consider: the audience? Or broadcast vs. directed communication? Maybe that's just a variant on your Access dimension?

stoweboyd · 7 months ago

I try to avoid the term 'audience', but I am trying to get at what I think you are talking about with the Access dimension.

erik · 7 months ago

Well articulated. It will be interesting to see how enterprises integrate into becoming a socialprise.

gravity7 · 7 months ago

Stowe,

good stuff as always. I'd be interested in another layer that touches on attention. not sure that i like "secret" but that may just be the term's connotations. I think addressed, direct, and indirect might be another way of characterizing the different ways that email/IM/microblog are addressed to "recipients." We address ourselves when talking to people -- in email, we address the person while writing. In IM, we're talking directly to each other. In micro-blogging, we're talking indirectly (in front of) with each other.

The bias and distortion in microblogging is introduced by the indirectness of communication -- that a post is seen by "bystanders" to the conversation -- which is something that can motivate the act of posting itself. And that of course is an engine for the attention economy, and resulting social capital, influence, etc etc that makes microblogging uniquely social.

So it'd be interesting to do a slide on attention. What would the three modes be?

Personal/private, Social, Public?

Channeled, Contained, Open?

Inclined, Aware, Solicited?

Attention gets at presence, relationships, and aspects of communication involving expectations and social practices that are tough to simplify. But would be interesting to hear what you think. Is there an attention economy in email? Is there only an attention economy in social media? Then what does the "public" mode of twitter do to the attention economy? What's the impact of follower counts and celebrities on that? etc etc...

David Recordon · 7 months ago

Hey Stowe, how are you finding this changing how you work especially with clients when not everything can/should be public? I hate my inbox, but beyond thinking of new ways to sort it (I want to see my inbox become more social and topical and less chronological) I don't see how a lot of my email can transition to a fully public environment. Thoughts?

stoweboyd · 7 months ago

I think that a lot of secretive email communication would do fine in a public setting. A pal wondering if we could meet up on an upcoming trip, or a recommendation for something to write about could certainly be managed in a fully public context.

We have become used to living secretive lives, rather than open ones. Our ethics and codes of conduct are constructed around principles of default secrecy.

From my perspective, a large swath of everyday business communication would greatly benefit from being conducted in the open, or dramatically shifted in tone and purpose.

So it's not just that the sorts and styles of communication we are involved in now would shift to a public context, but the very nature of what and how we are communicating would change if we were to operate under the premise of openness.

There is still a place for privacy and even secrecy, but the notion that all communication defaults to secret and is only made private or public after some examination seems to me to be the opposite of sensible. On the contrary, secrecy should be the exclusive province of only a small fraction of the world's dealings.

Samuel · 6 months ago

Finally had time to read your post. Great post and very helpful. Love the secret-private distinction. Some time ago I tried to explain the difference between email, messaging and microblogging and I can up with this: "Where do I share and store my information?. As you see I distinguished between 1-to-1 and n-to-n communication, but I like secret-private-public better. Because email does not have to be 1-to-1 (although it mostly is), but it definitely is secret. Thanks again!