Tagged: Communication RSS

  • Michael Hafner 12:44 am on September 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Communication, online media, trust   

    Trust and online media is a big topic nowadays. I’m running a research on the communication- and business dimensions of trust in online media (more on http://www.themashazine.com/trust-exchange ), but I’m especially looking for a community to discuss the philosophical dimensions of trust.

    Some first questions and thoughts I came up with:

    What do you talk of, when you talk of trust?

    * Do you have a social, a political, a philosophical approach?
    * Is trust bound to freedom, can you only trust when you are free to do so?
    * If you don’t have another option than to trust – does this turn trust into hope? – You don’t have a choice, so you just hope that everything will turn out fine.
    * What’s the relation of trust and power? we want to trust the powerful, because they could harm us; we want to trust in that they don’t. Do we need the trust of the weak? Does trust turn the weak into powerful ones: If they need to be trusted, if we need them to trust us – that means they are too powerful to be forced? Is this a part of the nature of trust that turns trust into one of the reasons of censorship: Because trust could lead to a shift of power, you have to avoid it as good as you can.
    * What’s the relation between trust, freedom and attention? You can distrust me, you can tell others not to trust me – but by which means and in how far can you extend the effects of your opinion, convince other people? Give me a bad rating, if you can (eg on ebay) – are you sure it does not affect you at the end? You can even declare me public enemy, it might kill my reputation on one market, but it might be the most efficient PR I ever head in the rest of the world…

    And after all: Why do almost all of us (at least officially) acknowledge that trust is simply a great thing?

     

  • Charlie Profit 9:41 pm on June 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Charlie Profit, Communication, Golden Rule, Manners, Netequette, Respect   

    Social Media Etiquette 

    What I want to write about today has probably been discussed ad nauseam in some forums: Net Etiquette, or “Netiquette”. There was a time when one could get online and be totally belligerent because they maintained anonymity. I think we have finally progressed where that attitude is becoming less acceptable. Don’t misunderstand. I know people are still belligerent and flame wars still exist on various message boards, but netizens (internet citizens) are becoming less tolerable. But how should one act in an arena that is still new and uncharted for the most part? Essentially, behave how you do in the real world!

    Practicing good “Netiquette” is to be respectful of other people you are having conversations with. Being respectful doesn’t mean you have to agree with their point of view, but in essence you agree to disagree. In doing so you also show respect for lurkers, people that don’t actively participate but read the conversations. This way you won’t insult anyone’s intelligence. People will always have reasons to disagree, and most times you will not change someone’s mind. But if you are respectful, your point of view will have a better chance of being considered a worthy point of view for the mere fact that you kept your integrity while discussing it. You may not be the “mind changer”, but by being pleasant and respectful you have a better chance of planting a seed.

    Being respectful also means you don’t throw out insults, or ad hominem attacks (such as insulting someone on their grammar instead of responding to the topic of conversation directly). There is nothing that shows weakness more than a senseless insult, or name calling. What you end up doing is undermine your own credibility as an effective debater. “Your momma so ugly” type comments are best left for the playgrounds. It’s easy to cast an insult, but it shows true character to bite your tongue at the urge to be disrespectful.

    You also should be careful to not confuse your own opinion with fact. People often write up their opinion as an actual fact. In order for something to be factual, you have to be able to prove what you are saying with resources that one can reference. These resources must also be accepted as “trustworthy” or have a trustworthy reputation. There is nothing wrong with expressing your opinion so long as people understand that is what you are doing.

    I have always said it is up to the sender of the message to make sure the receiver of the message understands it. While the receiver does have some responsibility in understanding, it ultimately falls on the sender. You shouldn’t be insulted or get upset when you are misunderstood either. If you have been misunderstood, it gives you an opportunity to practice your communication skills!

    I think the easiest way to make sure we are not misbehaving on our net excursions is to practice the Golden Rule: treat others the way we want to be treated. It is hard to mess that one up.

     

    • Evan 5:04 pm on June 22, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      This is becoming more intriguing as Facebook grows, since FB is not anonymous, anything I say is traced back to me and the pictures of my family. I am happy to see more actual people online as opposed to the avatars and usernames that roam the earth.

      I suppose not surprisingly, you still see a lot of hate on facebook, but it looks especially hilarious next to a smiling picture of the hate monger posing next to his daughter…

  • thePuck 7:45 am on April 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Communication, , , , signifier, , , ,   

    “Do you see what I mean?” How a drunk-driving tweetstorm cast doubt on the solidity of the ’signifier’ 

    Communication code scheme
    Image via Wikipedia

    Recently, I butted in on a tweetstream. A woman boasted about how she’d been worried about her drunk friend, and that she’d driven close behind her to make sure she got home safely. My retort was that if she was so concerned for her friend’s safety, why was the friend driving drunk? Why weren’t her car keys confiscated, with her ensconced safely in a cab?

    Needless to say, things got heated. She was tweeting in the USA after a long hard night out drinking with her buddy. I was tweeting across numerous timezones fresh eyed, sitting in the morning sun in South Africa.

    I softened my tone.

    Let me rephrase that. In MY opinion, I softened my tone.

    From where I was standing, I felt like I was offering the peace olive.

    That’s not what she took out of my communication. All she could hear was the supercilious, snide, judgemental haranguing of some creep on the southern tip of a continent she couldn’t even stab at on a map.

    I’ve since blocked her Twitter account. I have no interest in following the thoughts of a partygoing condoner of drunk driving.

    But heck… What if we could have aligned our meanings? What if we could have shared access to our inner thoughts? We both tried. But with varying levels of skill and intent.

    A fundamental in communication is verification that one’s message has indeed been delivered intact.

    Because signifiers — the ‘carriers of signs’, the ‘deliverers of meaning’ — are slippery beasts, they shift, and are differently understood from person to person.

    The trouble is that we tend to take our signifiers for granted. We don’t really think for a moment that the signifiers we use — our very words — might run the risk of being misunderstood. We are, after all, communicators, no? And signifiers are, after all, the pack mules of communication.

    When I say the word ‘Love’, for instance, it is a signifier that carries a vast payload. So vast that it’s unlikely you’ll understand it the same way I do. I might be issuing it as a declarative verb. I might be INSTRUCTING you to go out and love!

    You might have ‘heard’ a noun, a wishy washy, ‘Ah, love is such a joy.’ Or a vicious, ‘Love is disgusting, and causes pain and misery.’

    As the sender of a message, I trust and pray that the message I THINK I’m sending is the same one you’re receiving.

    There’s a fair amount of hard work we can do to try and encode our intent into a message. We can provide context. We can use logical thought progressions. We can ground our speech in practical, real-world examples. We can seek verification from those who receive our message.

    But ultimately, no matter how skillfully we encode our messages, the slippery nature of signifiers always eludes us. Put simply… It is impossible for you and me to calibrate our understanding so that what I grasp in the privacy of my own head matches what YOU grasp. You may SAY you get my meaning. I may even AGREE that your summary of my meaning is indeed what I intended. But the signifiers we use are too slippery for certainty.

    This puts pressure on our social media communications. As an avid Twitterer (or Tweeter, or twit, or whatever signifier you’d like to assign to the concept), I’m well aware of the power of the shifting signifier to cause great misunderstanding and anger.

    Here’s the rub. In social media, we’re confined to conveying loads of info in very small channels. Twitter gives us 140 characters to convey our message. So we use ‘lowest common denominator’ words as our signifiers. We simplify our language to fit all of our meaning in. Which means that we lose richness. We dumb down. And even so, our basic words have so much slippage that we’re misunderstood.

    I’ll try and summarize this post as a tweet:

    ‘@royblumenthal: D’ya understand what I think I said? And if so, could you lemme know what you think I said? Significant? And don’t drink’n'drive!’

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    • Michael Hafner 8:04 am on September 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      hey that a great post; I´ve written a lot about the meaninglessness of the signifier, but unfortunately most of it in german.
      the challenge with social media and understanding is not only speed and limited space, but in my eyes also the moving and changig contexts:
      if you read my book, I have a fairly good idea about what you are doing
      if you are reading my weppage, I loose a little bit of control – I don’t know where you start, how you come there, what device you use
      if you read my rss feed – I have no idea of how, when, where and what you are actually doing
      and here, it´s actually the worst and most unsecure case: I THINK I have an idea about what you said, and I THINK that what I post here should make some meaning – but shouldn’I actually get back and have a closer look on what you actually wrote? shouldn’t I try to find out more on who you are, to make sure I get your background and know in whcih context you are talking?
      On the other hand – why should I? Your existence, to me, are just a few lines of text, there will probably never be any closer encounter. So why shouldn’t I just take this, do what ever I want, understand it however I think, and not care about your “real” intentions at all?

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