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by tjradcliffe
4275 days ago
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One would hope we'll get over this, although it's been around as long as online communication has. USENet was the prototype for the modern Web, and it had all the problems we see today, at least in places. Trolls, harassment, the Two-Minutes Hate... they all spread around the world via NNTP. RA Lafferty wrote a story about how communication between humans in fact involved telepathy. Speech was just an epiphenomenon. No one believed the researchers, and so they developed a device that would suppress telepathic communication between people, and the result was chaos because even though people were still speaking the words, no one was understanding what was said. It's a fun little piece, and I recommend it if you can find it. I remember sometime in the early '90's thinking, "That's whats' going on with newsgroups!" People see the words and think they're communicating, but they aren't. If you've ever tried to reproduce an experiment based on a description in a scientific paper you'll realize how little information the words contain. Or learn how to do something from a manual. There was a George O Smith story about an ancient Martian device that was found with a manual the engineers were able to translate, but they found the manual contained just enough information to get them into trouble. Without the context of the engineering culture where the device was used it didn't contain nearly enough information. Smith was an electrical engineer, and knew what of he spoke. These two factors: poverty of information and cultural context make communication hard, even face to face. It is likely we'll get better at it over time, and that will come mostly from appreciating each other's differences and not assuming ignorance and idiocy every time anyone disagrees with us (an attitude I struggle with still...) |
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