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He was saying that we don't communicate via everybody writing on the board simultaneously, not that its not a valid form of communication in groups. People take

He was saying that we don't communicate via everybody writing on the board simultaneously, not that its not a valid form of communication in groups. People take turns.

jacobolus 8y ago
What he/she said is that “it's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication”. And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or small group tool. There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants writing on the same board. “Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.
- jungler 8y ago
  This observation is crucial to how we approach collaborative technology, though: the assumed goal has always been to achieve lower latency and finer granularity of changes to create the experience of simultaneous editing with instant feedback. What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See also: most comment threads.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Having the technical capability to all speak/write at once is wonderful. It cuts friction in the conversation. (Think of the difference between a phone call and a sequence of voice memos.) That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical matter, enforced by social convention.

He was saying that we don't communicate via everybody writing on the board simultaneously, not that its not a valid form of communication in groups. People take turns.

jacobolus 8y ago

What he/she said is that “it's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication”. And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or small group tool. There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants writing on the same board. “Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.

jungler 8y ago
This observation is crucial to how we approach collaborative technology, though: the assumed goal has always been to achieve lower latency and finer granularity of changes to create the experience of simultaneous editing with instant feedback. What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See also: most comment threads.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Having the technical capability to all speak/write at once is wonderful. It cuts friction in the conversation. (Think of the difference between a phone call and a sequence of voice memos.) That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical matter, enforced by social convention.