Visualization Ideas

Concepts for book visualization

• Photocopies of early letters
• Excerpts from famouse correspondences

Title Candidates

Title / central concept ideas:

• Dear Reader: Written Communications from Cicero to Cyrano, to Telegraph to iPhone
• Communication Gap: The Chaotic, Devolving State of Written Communications
• The Cyptic Psyche: The Chaotic, Devolving State of Written Communications & What it Means for Love, Family & Intellect

Book Layout

Every chapter will have these elements:

• a representative excerpt of the communication ("use case")
• a "good example" and a "bad" example
• clear statement of the paradigm

More time on social nets than email

This per NYT post via @stevecase

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/technology/internet/18drill.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Much of this is video - "cool medium" ?

Andrew Potter & discourse

Possible additional ideas from Andrew Potter:

• Topic drift as a passive indicator of discourse quality
• Self - Other - Idea continuum

Google Map Links / Generation

This snip shows how to refer to a Google map address from a web page. When Google Maps generates the URL ("link") for you, it hard-codes the current map display. Have the display zoomed to the desired level before requesting the link.

test test
Google Map

User Interfaces & the future

A jumping off point, tho rife w/ skeptical caveats and asides, are new breeds of UI's

E.g., see the YouTube playlist for novel UI's.

Insights from Web Design / Social networks

These tools and tips articles were not intended to be mini-treatises on communications styles, but they are.

Gladwell-esque

The book needs to be Gladwell-esque.

What does that mean?

1. David Leonhardt calls it a mixture of "social psychology, marketing, self-help."

Twitter as Dialect & Digital_Nation

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/blog/2009/05/the-future-of-twitter.html

• New dialects
• new communication frameworks
• compressed, more efficient business, personal life
• insularity's opposite

The email project redefined

The original insights were these:

• enterprises were being managed through email, and the medium was not a passive one
• email was transformative, in both good and bad ways
• email first appeared in 1982, which seemed to coincide with a perceived decline in analytical writing
• there was no precedent for the email "killer application"
• Visit functionality for Exchange, Outlook, Gmail; suggest improvements and interview architects and designers for these products
• go beyond what's in the two main books that have been published in the email space

I thought more about it, and realized that email was (just?) a stage in the evolution of written communication. Other significant inflection points in the history of written communication may have been:

• the emergence of literacy (correspendence between ordinary folk)
• postal systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_system

The revised perspective focuses on how written communication has evolved. Social networking phenomena are part of this in the public eye, though in fact they may not represent a significant advances.

A new set of interests, related but different, emerged:

• what it will mean that communications between people are shorter and more elliptical
• alternative ways of managing complexity in the new media
• A rethinking of McLuhan
• Cognitive psychology of discourse thread management - how memory organizes and prioritizes multiple conversations in the new media
• how romance is affected by these new formats
• how management practices are subtlely or more obviously altered by email
• why Twitter/Facebook are just aired-out email with elaborated address books
• what the future holds
• if video phones / video posts become commonplace, how will this transform written communications?
• effects on "literacy" E.g., trends in verbal skills in SAT / GRE

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to manage the channels for my other blogs. This is not a public site.