Saturday, November 29, 2008

Communication is hard. The web makes it easier in some ways but it's still difficult. I subscribe to some technical blogs and in many cases, I have no idea what the author is talking about. This is not so much because the concepts are difficult to grasp. It's more because the blogger throws abbreviations about like confetti at New Years, without going to the effort to provide links that might help an uninformed reader. Now there's the essence of the paradigm shift that the web is bringing about. We've been speaking to each other for a long time (millenia? I don't know when language was invented) but for the most part it's face-to-face or in small parties. Occasions where one person speaks to a large gathering were significant. Now they are insignificant. When you create a blog you have no idea how few or how many people will read it. You have no idea how much background they will have in the topic.

I think communication is evolving. The mere fact that I can provide links to help explain terms is only the start. This medium of language is actually very archaic and not well suited to the internet. Something along the lines of semantic trees would be more appropriate. But our brains are not wired that way presently. Future generations, however, will learn interactivity in entirely different ways.

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