Forms of communication
I stared at Noodles’ Emptiness, where I found a short rant on the currently most used forms of communication. No, into the most socially-useful forms of communication. No, into what works best for him. And, as each person’s experience is unique, I won’t try to correct him — Noodles knows himself much, much, much, much better than I do. But some people have wondered recently (i.e. at conferences I have been at) why I give such an atypical use to social networks (…a term which I still hold to be grossly misused, but that’s a topic for a different rant…One that’s been had too many times).
So, although my blog is syndicated at Planet Debian, and I know a good deal of readers come from there, this post is targetted at the rest of the world population: Those that don’t understand why many among us prefer other ways of communication.
Noodles mentions seven forms of communication he uses, arguably sorted by their nowadayness, low to high: Phone call, text (SMS) message, email, IRC, Skype, Google Hangouts and Facebook messenger.
Among those, I strongly dislike two: Phone call and Skype (or any voice-based service, FWIW). I do most of my communication while multitasking, usually at work. I enjoy the quasi-real-timeliness of IRC and the instant messengers, but much more, I like the ability to delay an answer for seconds or minutes without it breaking the rules of engagement.
Second, if the ordering is based on what I found, the reason for my little rant should become obvious: We had kept a great job so far building interoperable technology.[fn]Interestingly, a counterexample came up on me. One I do not remember, but I have seen printed information that make me believe it: Back in the 1940s/1950s, Mexico (Mexico City only perhaps?) had two parallel phone networks. If I’m not mistaken, one was Ericsson and the other was AT&T. Businesses often gave you both of their numbers in their ads, because you could not call one network from the other. And now that seems so backwards and unbelievable![/fn] Up until now, you could say «drop me a mail», and no matter if you had your mail with GMail and I insisted on self-hosting my gwolf.org, as long as our communications adhered to simple and basic standards, we would be perfectly able to communicate.
Skype is a bit of a special case here: They did build a great solution, ~ten years ago, when decent-quality VoIP was nowhere to be found. They have kept their algorithm and mechanisms propietary, and deliberately don’t operate with others. And, all in all, there is a case for them remaining closed.
But Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger do piss me off. More the first than the second. Both arrived to the instant messenger scene long after the experimentation and early stages, so they both took Jabber / XMPP, a well tried and tested protocol made with interoperability and federability in mind. And… They closed it, so they can control their whole walled garden.
So, yes, I do use them both — Because in both there are many people which I value, and which I want to be in touch with. And no, I won’t try to change the ways of everybody so they can talk with me on IRC. I’m an asshole, but everything has its limits! :) Of course, I can (still?) use them from my trusty old multiprotocol chat manager, Pidgin. And it’s so much better to have one small program gobbling up moderate heaps of memory than to be connected to the Facebook site, spending much more memory and CPU cycles via Javascript in a Web browser. Bah.
PS- Interestingly, he left out the face-to-face communication.I am quite an anchorite in my daily life, but I still think it’s worth at least a mention ;-)
So, Noodles: Thanks for the excuse to let me vent a rant ;-)