Conversation

About 10-15 years ago I had to start gently discouraging people from calling me on the phone without an appointment unless it was an emergency. Now I’m having to gently discourage people from texting me unless some real-time coordination like a rendezvous is in progress.
6
58
It’s like there’s a landing approach to synchronized real-time interaction now: 1. Initiate on any messenger 2. Calendar/pre-read/docs via email 3. Fine-tune rendezvous on texts* 4. Arrive at irl/video/phone coupling * or whatever you have push notifications turned on for
Interesting that powerful orgs resist asynch media when *they* want something from you. Banks, governments etc only email or text for passive updates or automated interactions. If they actually want something, they call and expect you to pick up. They’re all collection agencies.
1
26
You’ve heard “communication moves to the lowest fidelity medium that will do the job” Corollary: “communication moves to the least synchronized medium that will do the job” Synchronization = temporal fidelity. I’m gonna start calling phone/video/irl “TeFi” systems.
1
27
TeFi scale (0-10) 0 - 4: Various asymmetric and/or more or less public social media 5 - 6: Private messengers, push notifications off 7: Private messenger or SMS, push notifications on 8: Voice 9: Video 10: IRL 11: IRL, no connectivity 12: IRL, no distractions at all (books, tv)
1
14
Above 10/10 on my scale, you’re in hypersynchronized state. Parallel threads that might take your mind to another time/place are cut off. You’re forced into single-threaded present. Synchronization is not just about temporal alignment. It’s about attention monopolization.
1
8
Since most of us are not level 42 monks who can focus 110% on the herenow unaided, comms technology tends to have affordances based on the one way we CAN all get there: alarm style UXs. A phone ring (and now a push notification ding) is an alarm to trigger stress response.
1
11
Interrupt/alarm based comms tech handshake protocols is fundamentally limited by the stressfulness of the initiating event. Which is why we all hate them and try to wean ourselves off them except for actual mild to severe emergencies where a stress response is appropriate.
1
4
Only family gets to live in push notification+ zone for most of us, partly because family is a sort of persistent, continuous partial mild ongoing emergency called “life itself”. You need that shared situation awareness.
2
12
This line of thought suggests to me that the major divide is not between online and offline. It is between stream escalation vs stream interruption. Here a stream can be understood as a shared situation awareness social information flow with a consensus temporal-fidelity level.
2
12
The background stress level of a stream is a function of the mean time between state updates. Though I tweet a lot, sometimes ~100 a day, I can be off for days or weeks without feeling any FOMO at all.
1
2
Addendum: I missed email on my TeFi scale! Where it’s coupled to scheduling it’s an 8 or so. Otherwise it’s a 5-6.
1
3
Addendum 2: Cat is now meowing at me since it’s feeding time. That’s a push notification I can’t turn off 😂😾
1
12
Attaching a related newer thread here.
Quote Tweet
I want to do another thread related to the previous one, on temporal fidelity, on “I-it time” versus “I-you time”. Object relations time versus social relations time. And indirectly about interest vs social graphs. And more concretely about documents in social media. twitter.com/vgr/status/115…
Show this thread
2