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> There is also something weird about inviting people to listen in on a pseudo-private conversation. It makes it very artificial and staged somehow. Agree. Wha
by graue 14y ago
> There is also something weird about inviting people to listen in on a pseudo-private conversation. It makes it very artificial and staged somehow.
Agree. What if they were actually private conversations, but with the same model of inviting people in?
I thought of Branch recently when I was reading the intro of Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"[1]. He mentions that before the internet, technology only enabled two-way, one-to-one communication (telephone, telegraph) and one-way, one-to-many communication (newspapers, radio, TV). The pattern of many-to-many, starting with BBSes in the 70s and becoming fully ubiquitous only now with Facebook, is new.
It got me thinking about how the many-to-many communication models online don't match those we have offline. When you have many-to-many communication offline, you sit down at a table with a small group of friends, family, or colleagues. Everyone at the table can listen and speak. People can leave, or new people can be invited to join. And the group is an ad-hoc one, formed for the conversation, which doesn't persist after the conversation is over.
There's no form of online conversation that has these characteristics — no remotely mainstream one, anyway. And Branch is interesting to me because it's sort of trying to tackle that, except by allowing everyone in the world to read the conversations (or "listen"), they turned it into something completely different.
I don't think many-to-many communication online is a solved problem. We may still see new, better models that will displace the current ones.
[1]: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
- jacques_chester 14y agoI don't think Shirky is right. In-person many-to-many communication is a known problem. It's called "meetings", or sometimes "Parliament" or "Congress". The key technique used is to create a mutex on emitting sound. There's a family of very sophisticated transactional protocols built around managing this mutex. It's called "Rules of Order".
- wcarss 14y agoI don't mean to suggest that many-to-many communication online is a solved problem, but I want to note that the description you offered of small-group many-to-many communication offline, "you sit down at a table with a small group of friends, family, or colleagues. Everyone at the table can listen and speak. People can leave, or new people can be invited to join. And the group is an ad-hoc one, formed for the conversation, which doesn't persist after the conversation is over.", sounds a lot like a thread on a forum to me. Or a thread on Hacker News, to whatever extent we'd like to claim this isn't a forum. People interested in the listed topic see it and "join" by entering, then glance around either near the beginning or the end, or try to get caught up, looking for a strand to join in with. They can leave again freely or speak up, and whoever is left paying attention may respond to them. Only the people interested continue to pay attention, and eventually the discussion dies out and everyone's moved on. The ad-hoc group no longer persists. It doesn't really have an effective way to invite people into the conversation, but I feel that the other things are present.
- graue 14y agoNope, that's not private and not restricted. Essentially everyone in the world is invited and everyone in the world (even those who don't speak) can listen. In practice the number of participants is much larger; at a table you probably have 2 <= N <= 10. And there's no presence information: if someone "gets up from the table" (stops looking at the thread) you don't know that. There's no visible distinction between being silent and not being there at all.
- wcarss 14y agoAh, the distinction of smallness and privacy outside of the group didn't originally catch my eye. Thanks for clearing it up. :)