Feb 17
On The Plethora Of Communication Media
I have been thinking, over the last couple of days, about various means of internet-enabled communication that are pervasive today. Mostly about why they exist and what value they add to our lives. I decided on a few criteria that i would judge them by:
- Engagement: The extent to which a particular medium allows for community participation, allows for people to voice their views and is inclusive of the world. Social networks like Facebook are designed to be very engaging starting from their 'pokes' to their social games. On the other hand, blogs are more about commentary than equal participation.
- Bandwidth: How much effort is it to voice your opinion. Twitter is the easiest - you don't have to think beyond 140 characters and you can do it by simply sending a text message. Creation of a wikipedia article, at the other end of the spectrum, is a lot more effort.
- Signal To Noise Ratio: How easy is it to find the exact information that one is looking for. Wikis and blogs are great at this where as social networks are pretty abysmal.
- Synchronicity: How 'real-time' is the mode of communication. Chatting is as close to real-time as we can get with all the people involved online at the same time.
- Trust: Almost all communication media are a means of providing information. How trustworthy are these sources. Now, i separate trust from reliability. You can trust that a friend of facebook gives you a honest opinion of a product you are looking to buy, but you might not necessarily rely on his opinion. My scale of trust is based on a two factors: Is something provided by a group of experts and validated over time (like wikipedia / groups) or is it coming from close friends (like social networks); both of these are fairly trustworthy.
- Serendipity: What is communication without a little fun. A lot of the joy in social networking is derived from chancing upon a video or photograph that you liked.
I rated the various media (on a scale of 1-5) and here they are. The bigger the size of the bar (each individual bar too), the better it is.
A few observations:
- The standard deviation of email and groups is the least. They do a decent job at most things and are not the best way to communicate at any. It is also why they are still so prevalent - you can get by.
- The highest standard deviation is for Twitter and chat. They are great a few things and completely terrible at a few others. If you have ever been part of a live chat with more than 5 people or if you have had to navigate through a river of ridiculous tweets, you know the pain.
- As one can tell, there is still a lot of scope for improvement in the way we communicate and exchange information online (the highest score is only 2/3rd of the maximum possible).
I, then, decided to categorize the different types into 'old' and 'new'. I considered blogs, wikis, email, groups and chat as 'old media' and twitter, facebook and buzz as 'new media'. Here's what i found by taking averages (the larger the number, the better):
As you can tell, new social media solve some of the problems that traditional internet media had, but they introduce completely different problems; one of the reasons i am not too fond of them. Also, the cleave between what new media does well and what it completely fails at is quite large (the standard deviation, again).
The most desirable communication medium will be easy to use and provide a high level of interaction with low noise and high quality from sources i can trust. And it'll pleasantly surprise me occasionally. Will it be a combination of the existing media or will it be something completely different? Or maybe the different types of media will always exist and serve different purposes.
Footnote: was Google Wave trying take the leap and be the 'ideal' communication medium? Is that why it failed to take off? We might never know.
