The medium and the message

Jump to Comments

In a post on Lost in translation, Brad notes some of the limitations of blogs and e-mail as communications media. You can communicate with people by blog or e-mail for a long time, and yet still miss something because you have never met them face to face. Rick Twigg makes a similar point in this article, where he notes how e-mail has changed the face of newspaper reporting. Matt Stone asks a similar question: is Facebook a better place to discuss something than a mailing list?

Perhaps it’s time for Marshall McLuhan to make a comeback!

Which medium should one choose for which task?

In the early days of electronic communications the choice was relatively easy. On Unix systems there was mail (one to one) and there was news (one to many). On Fidonet (and Fido technology systems) there was Netmail (one to one) and Echomail (many to many).

Mail and Netmail were different forms of e-mail, and it was possible to gate from one to the other. Mail servers that sent to multiple recipients enabled mailing lists, which were not as efficient as Echomail, but produced a kludge of a many to many system.

Then came the Web, and the commercialisation of the Internet. Commercialisation produces a conflict of interests between users and providers. The providers want to increase advertising revenue, so they want to get users to go to them for everything. Yahoo! produced a web directory, Google produced a search engine that was better. But then they wanted people to come to them for everything, so they bought other companies that provided other services, and tinkered with them to make them fit their portals, and very often degraded them in the process. They want to create the impression that one size fits all, one tool does everything. So if you go to Yahoo for e-mail, and blogging, and photo sharing, and whatever else you want to do on the internet, their advertising click rate will go up and their profits will increase.

And so we come to Facebook. Facebook scored by producing a social networking site that had a more user-friendly interface than their biggest rival, MySpace, and by starting with university students and getting them hooked first.

But they still haven’t mastered that completely yet. They’ve branched out into “apps” by third parties, that clutter your screen and waste your time, and make it more difficult to do the stuff they are good at — helping you to keep in touch with people you know. If they improved that, it would be a big plus, rather than having people you’ve never heard of wanting to be your “friend” just so they can collect more “friends” than anyone else. And you can demonstrate this “friendship” by giving them all virtual vibrating hamsters.

It is obviously more profitable to Facebook if you go to look at photos there (instead of Photobucket or FlickR), if you discuss there instead of mailing lists (even though the forum interface is far more clunky and difficulty to get to). But it’s not necessarily the best way of communicating.

If they stuck to their core business, and improved that, it might make their service more useful to users. For a start, they need to have more contact categories, such as:

1. Close family
2. Extended family
3. Close friends
4. Acquaintances
5. Online friends
6. Online acquaintances
7. Business associates an work colleagues
8. Clients, customers and vendors
9. Other

And each of these could have different levels of privacy settings and what they can see of your profile. That would be useful.

But they would like you to use Facebook to replace e-mail, and that is not useful. I still get an e-mail to tell me that someone has left me a message on Facebook. So why couldn’t the person have sent me the e-mail in the first place, so that I could read it right away, instead of having to wait until I next go into Facebook? That is a waste of bandwidth — the message, and then the message to tell me that there is a message. But it suits Facebook if I go to their website and their ad revenue goes up. Never mind that more of my bandwidth is used up and eventually I lose web access on the 20th of the month instead of the 25th because I’ve used my allocation. And then those messages that I’ve got a message on Facebook keep coming, from the 20th to the 30th, and I can’t read the messages themselves.

Get with it, folks. Facebook is not the medium for personal messages: e-mail is. Facebook is not the medium for many-to-many discussions, mailing lists are. Fido-type echo conferences would be better still, but software development for those has stopped, so for some of us they are just fond memories while others don’t know what they missed.

Each form of electronic communication has some purposes it is good for, and others it is not good for. One needs to think which ones are best for what.

Is the prime aim of communication one-to-one, one-to-many, one-to-few, or many-to-many?

• one-to-one - email, snail mail, phone call or (shock! horror!) a personal visit
• one-to-many - standard web page (for information that doesn’t change much); blog or newsgroup (for changing information that needs frequent updating)
• one-to-few - blog or social networking site (like Facebook)
• many-to-many - mailing list or newsgroup

Choosing the right medium doesn’t solve all communications problems, but it can help.

Another thing, which seems very difficult to achieve, is getting people to see electronic communication as a supplement to face-to-face communication. I’ve been to face-to-face meetings that could have been hugely more productive if the preparation and follow-up had been done electronically. People are gathered from all over the world at great expense for a meeting that lasts a few days, and disperse again and the effect is dissipated because they don’t stay in touch to follow up. But that’s a losing battle I’ve been fighting for nearly 20 years now. I’m ready to give up.

3 Comments

Filed under Facebook, MySpace, blogging, metablog, missiology, social networking

Tags: Fidonet, media