Lot's of interesting points in your post.
>>The Internet changes the rules of communication. Writers
can either write to please themselves without regard for
their readers or they try to write for the readers' interests.
I take your point (I think), but I'd put it that the internet
changes the mechanics in such a way that "rules" for various
forms of communications, which existed before, tend to
get mixed up. Or rather, the situations get mixed up in
ways that are new, at least in degree if not entirely.
So appropriate rules (or etiquette or effective
communication techniques) change dynamically.
On SI, various threads have
entirely different characters (which you might expect),
change character over time (also you might expect), change
character frequently (disconcerting), have different
characters in different sub-conversations (dizzying),
and so on.
These things happen in real life conversations too, of
course, but less often and less markedly. Besides, IRL
we don't write it all down and hand out meeting minutes.
>>Writers can either write to please themselves without
regard for their readers or they try to write for the
readers' interests.
Or, as I'm sure you actually mean, a thousand variations
in between. The thing is (IMO) in a chat thread it's
easier to impose a comment interesting only to oneself
in the middle. Your audience is captive in that they
have to at least read enough to know they want to skip
it. This is harder to do IRL (except maybe in church
or the classroom). Here it's the rule rather than the
exception.
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) the fact that anyone
can essentially impose themselves, interesting or not,
on others in a conversation without effective means
of ostracism, is what leads to your comment:
>>Thus, there is a need for way in which the
reader can exert a higher degree of local filtering
according to his needs.
The need extends beyond a substitute for social ostracism
or the "inappropriateness" of what a writer is saying.
That is, for example, to you a post may be uninteresting
(doesn't meet your needs) but to me it may be just the
ticket. So it's very much a personal issue. This
is probably what you meant anyhow, but the point is
it's not only in the intent or thoughtfulness of the
writer; it very much involves the reader(s) as well.
>> Perhaps such a simple concept is beyond our grasp at
present.
I don't think it's simple. In fact, if by "filtering" you
mean applying a priori selection criteria to characteristics
of a post, I think it's hopeless. To exaggerate the case
somewhat, the only filter I really trust is my mind which
has to be applied to each message individually.
This IS an exaggeration: Of course I use other filters--I read
only certain threads, I skip posts by certain people,
I read SI and not Yahoo, etc. Moreover, my mind doesn't
always work so hot either<ggg>.
Nevertheless, to my rapidly cooling mind, the way to
approach the problem is to make it more efficient for the
ol' mind-filter to work. For me, the "dialog form"
(which we've been calling coffeehouse), like
a play script with characters and text, seems to work
better than the standard SI "email form" with senders
and message headers.
However, this is a guess; I don't HAVE the dialog form
on any threads I actually follow. Also it doesn't work
backwards very well (for me), and I can't vary the
message order by thread.
So I don't really know if what I've been asking for is
really what I want. (Careful what you want, you might
get it <ggg>.) However, I can skim books and articles
pretty fast and decide if I want to read deeper, so
I'm fairly confident it would help. This is, of course,
my personal method and many others would want something
different probably.
I can think of other possibilities, of which most, perhaps
all, have been posted on this thread at one time or another. |
