Comments on: Random thoughts on the attenuation of conversation http://www.lisjobs.com/blog/?p=403 Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:31:48 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: walt crawford http://www.lisjobs.com/blog/?p=403&cpage=1#comment-5527 walt crawford Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:21:07 +0000 http://www.lisjobs.com/blog/?p=403#comment-5527 This is an excellent and intriguing post, one that I really need to comment on in a post...or, possibly, in the talk & article I'm working on. (Talk for OLA, article for C&I February 2009). But for an introvert who's a lousy multitasker (if I want my writing to be any good at all), it's worse. I can't keep an FF window open while I'm writing, any more than I could keep an LSW Meebo window open or a FaceBook window open. And I'm finding that, not only do blog conversations seem somewhat attenuated these days, but--so far--I have mixed feelings about FB and FF as substitutes. The noise-to-signal ratios seem so much higher than in blogs (even as I keep hiding more and more categories in FriendFeed--so far I don't have any useful conversations in Facebook) that I'm already wondering whether it will prove worthwhile. Once in a while, it's great--but there's just so much! Somehow, even the 500+ liblogs I've been following (and I'm about to cut back on those rather severely) seem like nothing--after all, very few people post all that often. It's not just fragmentation. It's also attenuation. To use an in-person analogy, I try to avoid dinners with more than half a dozen people and prefer small social gatherings to very large ones; otherwise, the noise-to-signal ratio is just too high. That's a quick thought. Maybe I'll do something more substantive on my blog...but the article and talk come first. This is an excellent and intriguing post, one that I really need to comment on in a post…or, possibly, in the talk & article I’m working on. (Talk for OLA, article for C&I February 2009).

But for an introvert who’s a lousy multitasker (if I want my writing to be any good at all), it’s worse. I can’t keep an FF window open while I’m writing, any more than I could keep an LSW Meebo window open or a FaceBook window open.

And I’m finding that, not only do blog conversations seem somewhat attenuated these days, but–so far–I have mixed feelings about FB and FF as substitutes. The noise-to-signal ratios seem so much higher than in blogs (even as I keep hiding more and more categories in FriendFeed–so far I don’t have any useful conversations in Facebook) that I’m already wondering whether it will prove worthwhile. Once in a while, it’s great–but there’s just so much!

Somehow, even the 500+ liblogs I’ve been following (and I’m about to cut back on those rather severely) seem like nothing–after all, very few people post all that often.

It’s not just fragmentation. It’s also attenuation. To use an in-person analogy, I try to avoid dinners with more than half a dozen people and prefer small social gatherings to very large ones; otherwise, the noise-to-signal ratio is just too high.

That’s a quick thought. Maybe I’ll do something more substantive on my blog…but the article and talk come first.

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