Ton Zijlstra is on to something.
He describes blogs as "personal presence portals", and then goes on to
describe the "awkwardness" that we feel when we go from 'knowing'
someone through their blog to meeting them in person. His solution to
that is simple: acknowledge the awkwardness explicitly in the first face-to-face conversation, and then work through it. Jon Husband chimes in
with the observation that on-line 'presence' is still foreign to us,
and we need to learn how to use it, much as at one point in our lives
we first learn to use the telephone. So why is it that learning to use
the telephone is childsplay, while learning to use blogs, especially
when 'enriched' with Skype VoIP telephony, IM, wikis and webcams is so
awkward, so hard?
It all comes down to the subject of Ton's post: presence. Ton refers to this article that defines presence as a high-quality simulation of actual personal existence,
high-quality implying socially rich, perceptually and socially
realistic, transporting (in both senses of the word), immersing, and
natural. Do blogs, with or without add-on multimedia tools, provide a
high-quality simulation of the author's existence, do they have presence?
To understand why this question is meaningless, we need to turn to the guru of media, Marshall McLuhan. In his landmark book Understanding Media,
almost half a century ago, he explained the difference between media
and tools. Communications media are place holders for content, for the message ("the medium is the message"). Communication tools are technologies that deliver
the content, the message . In today's electronic age, he said, the two
have become blurred together. So my communication media decision tree
from last year, reproduced above, while useful, is somewhat flawed, in
that it mixes the two together.
But if we want to understand blogs, which are part media, part tools,
we need to unblur these distinct characteristics. The best way to do
this is to understand what, in McLuhan's terminology, the constituent
parts of blogs are extensions
of. The telephone, a communication tool, is an extension of the ear and
the voice. Radio is a communication tool, likewise an extension of the
ear and voice, but the radio program is a communications medium, an extension of the programmer's memory (and, if we tape it, an extension of our memory as well).
Blogs, like newspaper columns or news digests, are essentially
communications media, extensions of our memories, place holders for our
ideas and messages. They are not really extensions of our brains,
because they capture, like a snapshot, our thinking at one point in
time. Although we can try to make them conversational and describe our
thought processes in a blog article, they do not, in their simplest
form, allow the reader to truly engage our brains in real or
close-to-real time.
Now, blogs also have two communication tools included: a publishing and
subscription tool (RSS), which does transmit our messages (very well),
and the rudimentary comments 'thread' functionality which, like a poor
web forum, does allow some dialogue with the author and with other
readers. The thread is a (lousy, and because it's asynchronous, jerky)
extension of our brains. To some extent the Internet itself is a
communication tool that disseminates our blog comment; it is the blog's
'printing press'. And by that analogy, RSS is like the delivery truck
that takes the newspaper to the subscriber's house -- both are
communication tools, though RSS is clearly the superior delivery
vehicle.
So what? Well, there is a huge amount of discussion about how to make
blogs better, how to use them in business, and what their future is,
none of which makes the essential distinction between their role and
value as communication media and their role and value as communication
tools.
I would argue that the critical functionality of blogs, both in
personal and business use, is as a personal communications medium i.e.
a storage space for everything of consequence in our memories, and
everything of consequence in that other extension of our memory, the
filing cabinet (and its electronic analogue, the 'My Documents'
folder). As I've said in my posts on the future of blogs and in my future state visions,
I think blogs will eventually (and properly) morph into purer, simpler
versions of this one critical functionality -- they will become the
proxies, the substitutes for our memories, for use by friends and
business contacts when we're busy or away from the high-presence
communication tools, by vendors to ascertain our need for their
offerings, and by ourselves as a place to organize, store and access
our own thoughts and memories, thus freeing up more of our real
memories for new ideas and perceptions. There have been some
interesting articles lately by people who say that making and keeping
huge numbers of dynamic lists and notes, instead of trying to keep all
that in our memories, we can actually enrich our brain's power, our
intellectual effectiveness and even our intelligence by 'freeing up
memory and brain CPU'. Next-generation blogs could be perfect for that,
not only freeing up our memories but also allowing others access to our
ideas and learnings.
So to that limited extent, blogs have presence -- they can be excellent
simulations, surrogates, proxies for our personal memories. But what if
we need more context to be able to properly understand the message, or
effectively use or build on the content of this virtual memory? Then we
need high-quality, high-presence communication tools,
not communication media. We are rapidly moving towards a convergence of
several 'online' communication tools: telephony, e-mail, IM, and
potentially voice-mail and videoconferencing. Right now, the content,
the stored messages of these various tools are unintegrated, but voice
recognition and transcription is quickly improving and we will soon be
able to 'record' conversations in any of these media in one simple,
intuitive way, and with Simple Virtual Presence
we will also have a simple intuitive way to connect with people using
any or all of these media. Then we'll need a 'bridge' to allow each of
the participants in a conference to see anything in the blog/virtual
memory of any of the participants.
Until that day arrives, blogs get high marks as a communication medium, but barely a passing grade
as communication tools. If the technology developers understand the
distinction, and start building tools that are properly engineered for
simple, seamless connectivity, then one day the blurring won't matter,
and the integration between media and tools will be complete.
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