¶ The Elements of a Conversation · 5 March 2006 essay/tech
A conversation, from the point of view of any one participant, has these three elements:
- the source: the other participants, either as individuals or as some collective they form for the purpose of this conversation
- the context: as simple as an explicit topic, as subtle as an implicit one, as complex as a network of human relationships
- your role: sometimes you are yourself, sometimes you are acting in a defined capacity, sometimes you participate in a conversation as part of a collective (like an audience)
All conversations have these same fundamental elements. At the moment, our electronic conversations are subdivided and segregated according to ultimately trivial subclasses (personal email, IM, mailing lists, newsletters, feeds, web sites themselves, innumerable other variations on alerts), and the useful tools for managing conversations are scattered across similarly (arbitrarily) segmented applications.
The conversation tool I really want will be built on the structural commonality of conversations, instead of the disparities. I want to apply email rules to RSS feeds, feed mechanics to mailing lists, contact lists as view filters, identities as task organizers, Growl formats as cell-phone notification styles. I want my email correspondence with my mom to be at least as rich as my soccer "correspondence" with the MLSnet front page, and I want my conversation with MLSnet to be as malleable as my own iTunes song status.
I want, I think, for all my conversations to be structurally equal. I want to be able to look at them organized by any of those elements: by source, by context or by my role, and by the unions and intersections thereof. I want to see conversations in context when there's context, and I want there to more often be far more context than a list. I want to be able to understand my side of my conversations in aggregate, and for the memberships of my conversations to be effortlessly expandable, and for my computers to remember things my head forgets, even when I can't remember whether I knew them to begin with.
I want, of course, the whole internet redesigned with this desire at its core, but I also want approximations of this in the meantime. I want Apple Mail or GMail to stop acting like somebody invented "mailing lists" and "address books" yesterday morning. Or I want Shrook or BlogBridge to speak POP3 and IMAP as fluently as RSS and OPML. Or I want Safari to look like Apple solving a problem from their own principles rather than letting somebody else define the form of the answer, or Flock aspiring to be a social application rather than just a browser with a few extra menu commands. I want Agenda and Magellan back now that I finally have enough information to justify them.
I want us to have the conversations we could have if we didn't spend so much time just trying to keep track of what morbidly little we've already managed to say.
- the source: the other participants, either as individuals or as some collective they form for the purpose of this conversation
- the context: as simple as an explicit topic, as subtle as an implicit one, as complex as a network of human relationships
- your role: sometimes you are yourself, sometimes you are acting in a defined capacity, sometimes you participate in a conversation as part of a collective (like an audience)
All conversations have these same fundamental elements. At the moment, our electronic conversations are subdivided and segregated according to ultimately trivial subclasses (personal email, IM, mailing lists, newsletters, feeds, web sites themselves, innumerable other variations on alerts), and the useful tools for managing conversations are scattered across similarly (arbitrarily) segmented applications.
The conversation tool I really want will be built on the structural commonality of conversations, instead of the disparities. I want to apply email rules to RSS feeds, feed mechanics to mailing lists, contact lists as view filters, identities as task organizers, Growl formats as cell-phone notification styles. I want my email correspondence with my mom to be at least as rich as my soccer "correspondence" with the MLSnet front page, and I want my conversation with MLSnet to be as malleable as my own iTunes song status.
I want, I think, for all my conversations to be structurally equal. I want to be able to look at them organized by any of those elements: by source, by context or by my role, and by the unions and intersections thereof. I want to see conversations in context when there's context, and I want there to more often be far more context than a list. I want to be able to understand my side of my conversations in aggregate, and for the memberships of my conversations to be effortlessly expandable, and for my computers to remember things my head forgets, even when I can't remember whether I knew them to begin with.
I want, of course, the whole internet redesigned with this desire at its core, but I also want approximations of this in the meantime. I want Apple Mail or GMail to stop acting like somebody invented "mailing lists" and "address books" yesterday morning. Or I want Shrook or BlogBridge to speak POP3 and IMAP as fluently as RSS and OPML. Or I want Safari to look like Apple solving a problem from their own principles rather than letting somebody else define the form of the answer, or Flock aspiring to be a social application rather than just a browser with a few extra menu commands. I want Agenda and Magellan back now that I finally have enough information to justify them.
I want us to have the conversations we could have if we didn't spend so much time just trying to keep track of what morbidly little we've already managed to say.