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Steming from the Latin communicare meaning to share, join, unite and make common

(www, etymoline.com).

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Patsy Rodenburg explores how we speak, what we speak and the impact of the spoken word. As one of the world's leading voice coaches, she describes practical ways to approach language, and uses Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, modern prose and a range of other texts to help each of us discover our own unique need for words.

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"Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every directions at once; I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence... You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.
By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.
Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness. The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Everyone who says 'I' means something different by it from what every other person means. What is 'I' to me is only 'you' to you...
In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound... the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life."

"Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion."

More quotes...

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"Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another.

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Look Up (Live life the real way) - Gary Turk

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ACCESS
ALGORITHM
CAPITAL
COMMUNICATE
DATA
FREE
INTELLIGENCE
LIKING
MACHINE
PARTICIPATION
PLATFORM
PRIVACY
REAL-TIME
SPACE
TECHNOLOGY
USER
VALUE
WIRELESS
YOU
ZOOM

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Melanie Chan is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Cultures at Leeds Beckett University, UK. She has written numerous articles and essays on virtual reality, mobile media, and digital culture.

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As contemporary scholars, journalists, and commentators have indicated, mobile digital devices promote a constant shift of attention between the world around us and the stimulations afforded by screen-based interfaces. Investigating these uniquely contemporary hybrid interactions, Melanie Chan posits that while digital technologies are part of a long and historic trajectory, they nonetheless may instigate new forms of corporeal practices and experiences.

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Gone are the days of face-to-face only communication. Technology provides us with many fast and easy ways to connect with and communicate with others, such as through text messaging, instant messaging, and others. But can digitally-mediated communication compare to face-to-face communication?

Social and personality psychologists discussed how digitally-mediated interactions can impact our social relationships and well-being in the SPSP Annual Convention symposium titled "The Age of Digital Social Interactions: Can Technology Compete with In-Person Communication?"

Speakers included Susan Holtzman, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Patricia Greenfield, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Amori Mikami, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, California State University, Los Angeles.

How does text messaging, compared to face-to-face communication, play a role in social support in response to common stressors? It appears that text messaging does not increase positive emotions after experiencing common stressors as well as face-to-face communication. Although text messaging is one of the most popular forms of communication, overly relying on text messaging to seek support may have emotional costs over time.

Digitally-mediated communication may also hinder the development of social skills. For pre-teens, a high prevalence of digitally-mediated communication can worsen the development of recognizing and understanding the feelings of other people. A high prevalence of face-to-face social interaction, on the other hand, can improve this social skill for pre-teens.

Instant messaging was also found to be the least effective in facilitating the sense of bonding between college friends. Face-to-face interactions were the most effective, followed by video chat and audio chat (e.g., talking on the telephone), respectively.

However, the news isn't all grim. Digitally-mediated communication does show to have some benefits. Positive online relationships are important for students to successfully transition to university. In addition, the quality of both digital and in-person communication predict same-day well-being, although the positive feelings from digitally-mediated communication tends to dissipate more quickly than in-person communication.

Although digitally-mediated communication is becoming increasingly common and allows for quick and simple communication, overall it does not offer the same benefits that come with face-to-face communication. So, the next time you're thinking about catching up with your friends via text messaging, it may not be a bad idea to go see them instead.

Vivian P. Ta, NSF LSAMP BD Fellow and PhD student, University of Texas at Arlington

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Can Digitally-Mediated Communication Compare to Face-to-Face Communication? | SPSP

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Gone are the days of face-to-face only communication. Technology provides us with many fast and easy ways to connect with and communicate with others, such as through text messaging, instant messaging, and others. But can digitally-mediated communication compare to face-to-face communication?

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Conversations provide new opportunities for sharing information whilst stimulating creativity and enabling us to pool our intelligence. 

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Conversations provide new opportunities for sharing information whilst stimulating creativity and enabling us to pool our intelligence. 

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Goldsmith (2016)
Kelly (2016)
Shirky (2011)

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Publisher's Weekly:
"Digital culture expert and MIT professor Turkle (Alone Together) delivers a sweeping report on the various ways humans have adapted their sense of self and relationships to the digital age."

Aziz Ansari, author of Modern Romance:
"In a time in which the ways we communicate and connect are constantly changing, and not always for the better, Sherry Turkle provides a much needed voice of caution and reason to help explain what the f*** is going on."

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage :
"'Only connect!' wrote E. M. Forster in 1910. In this wise and incisive book, Sherry Turkle offers a timely revision: 'Only converse!'"

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock:
"Digital media were supposed to turn us from passive viewers to interactive participants, but Turkle reveals how genuine human interaction may be the real casualty of supposedly social technologies. Without conversation, there is no syntax, no literacy, no genuine collaboration, no empathy, no civilization. With courage and compassion, Turkle shows how the true promise of social media would be to reacquaint us with the lost of art making meaning together."

Gish Jen, author of Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land:
"To reclaim conversation is to reclaim our humanity. We all know it at some level, and yet how satisfying to find our hunch proved right: Turkle shows us that to love well, learn well, work well, and be well, we must protect a vital piece of ourselves, and can. What an important conversation about conversation this is."

Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education :
"Like the air we breathe, or the water we drink, most of us take face-to-face conversations for granted. In this brilliant and incisive book, Sherry Turkle explains the power of conversation, its fragility at present, the consequences of its loss, and how it can be preserved and reinvigorated."

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor and author of MOVE and Confidence:
"Sherry Turkle's unrivalled expertise in how people interact with devices, coupled with her deep empathy for people struggling to find their identity, shine through on every absorbing and illuminating page of Reclaiming Conversation. We can start remembering how to talk to one another by talking about this timely book."

Maryanne Wolf, John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research, and Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University:
"It is a rare event when a single book presents both a compelling indictment of one of the more insidious effects of technology on our culture and an immediate, elegantly simple antidote---all the while providing a stirring apologia for what is most important about language's power to move us, to expand our thoughts, and to deepen our relationship to each other. Once again, Sherry Turkle seeks to preserve human qualities that are eroding while we are always "elsewhere": empathy, generativity, and mentoring our young."

"Savvy and insightful."

"What Turkle brings to the topic that is new is more than a decade of interviews with teens and college students in which she plumbs the psychological effect of our brave new devices on the generation that seems most comfortable with them."

Lev Grossman, Time Magazine:
"Nobody has ever articulated so passionately and intelligently what we're doing to ourselves by substituting technologically mediated social interaction.... Equipped with penetrating intelligence and a sense of humor, Turkle surveys the front lines of the social-digital transformation...."

The Boston Globe :
"Important.... Admirably personal....Turkle's book will spark useful debate...."

New York Times Book Review:
"Turkle summarizes her new view of things with typical eloquence...fascinating, readable."

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Publisher's Weekly: "Digital culture expert and MIT professor Turkle (Alone Together) delivers a sweeping report on the various ways humans have adapted their sense of self and relationships to the digital age."

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Sherry Turkle (2015) claims that users are:

Increasingly speaking to machines

Forgetting the value of face-to-face conversation

Losing our capacity for empathy and understanding

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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

by Clay Shirky

325pp, Allen Lane, £20
We-Think
by Charles Leadbeater

290pp, Profile, £12.99

First the good news. It won't be long before borderline illiterate half-wit blowhards like me, with our fat salaries, expense-account lifestyles and stranglehold on the means of expression, become obsolete. Wikipedia, Second Life, Craigslist, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Flickr point the way to the lovely future where sharing caring groups of amateurs can connect in ways that will be experientially satisfying, community-boosting and, fingers crossed, democratically revivifying. I and 35,000 other paid journalists in the UK plus lots more worldwide face the knacker's yard.

So argues new media and social networking theorist Clay Shirky in his terrifically clever, though to my mind harrowing, book. He draws a parallel with scribes who laboriously handcopied the wisdom of the ages from fragile and decaying manuscripts. For generations they were indispensable in refreshing cultural memory, then in the mid-15th century Gutenberg's invention of movable type not only made their skills obsolete, but facilitated the Protestant Reformation. In 1492, the Abbot of Sponheim wrote a tract called In Defence of Scribes urging that the scribal tradition be maintained because the very act of handcopying sacred texts brought spiritual enlightenment. One problem: the abbot had his book set in movable type so his argument could be spread quickly and cheaply.

What humans will do with new kit is hard to predict. Shirky writes: "Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don't involve an orderly transition from point A to point B." Gutenberg did not know that his invention would aid Protestantism. Similarly, mobile phone manufacturers did not foresee how texting would become such an important feature of their products. The multiple social changes catalysed by the internet are just as unpredictable.

But both these authors boldly claim to have detected some of them. One is that the professional status of journalists is being destroyed. And a good thing too, argues Shirky: journalism, once a service, has become a bottleneck. "Anyone in the developed world can publish anything anytime, and the instant it is published, it is globally available and readily findable. If anyone can be a publisher, then anyone can be a journalist." This transforms settled matters of professional competence and law into vexed questions. Why can't I upload someone else's photographs and disseminate them around cyberspace? How can libel laws be enforced when everybody is yucking up their tuppence ha'penny worth online 24/7?

Publishing is undergoing a paradigm shift. The old model was filter, then publish: professional pride (such as it was) consisted of getting text into a reasonable state (ie, grammatically accurate, legally safe, borderline interesting, ideally not plagiarised) and then publishing it. Technological limitation made such professional skills important: the opportunity to redraft was limited once a newspaper hit the newsstands or a book hit the shelves. Yes, there were letters pages and second editions, but often errors went uncorrected and the authority of a few people became all but unquestionable.

Today's instant publishing reverses that model. Technology helps us to publish any old cobblers, then allows us to redraft it again and again. For Shirky and Leadbeater, this is thrilling. The energies of committed amateurs can be harnessed to engage in this potentially endless process of collaborative redrafting. Leadbeater, a former FT journalist and now self-proclaimedly one of the world's leading authorities on creativity in organisations, argues that the model of innovation is not Archimedes in the bath, still less the lonely genius in the garret. "Most advances in 20th-century science came from creative conversations." Heisenberg chatting to Bohr paved the way for quantum mechanics and nuclear weapons, for example. "Even Thomas Edison, the most famous lone inventor, owed his success to being a great collaborator, a skill picked up as an itinerant telegraph operator." Fair enough, but what has this to do with all the illiterate guff on blogs and those fatuous social networking sites?

The answer is that new media offer greater chances for collaboration. Wikipedia is touchstone for both Shirky and Leadbeater, and they trace its triumph with glee. Wikipedia was the bastard offspring of a failed collaborative effort to create a free online encyclopedia called Nupedia, whereby anyone could submit an article that would be reviewed in a seven-stage process by expert editors. That process proved cumbersome, so Nupedia's founders were introduced to a "wiki", a web page that could be edited by anyone with access to it. Any illiterate jerk could write the entry on, say, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The hope was that someone who knew a little more about the principle would read the first entry and, horrified, change it. Another would correct spelling errors. Another would add new material. Even efforts at sabotage would be corrected so long as (and this is the important point) users cared enough.

Wikis and other web-based social tools encourage extreme openness and decentralisation, say the authors, while discouraging the exercise of authority. But this isn't always true of new media sites. For instance, a group called Black and White Maniacs on the photography-posting site Flickr recently established a rule that if you post a photograph you must immediately comment on the previous two photographs; the idea was to thwart jokers who show no interest in others' work. This rule caused another problem: some users would leave nearly worthless comments ("nice", "good b+w"). As a result the Black and White Maniacs issued a new rule whereby those who consistently left one- or two-word comments would be removed from the group. But how can the extreme openness and decentralisation Shirky and Leadbeater prize survive in such a rule-bound climate?

New media teem with such dilemmas. Shirky, for all his proselytising chapter headings ("Sharing anchors a community", "Everyone is a media outlet"), admits: "A few people account for a wildly disproportionate amount of the overall connectivity." Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, called these people "connectors", but one person's connector could readily become another's bottleneck, gatekeeper, authority figure, onerous boss. Here comes everybody, perhaps, but led by the best connected. People, no doubt, like Shirky and Leadbeater.

Equally, both seem naive about the desirable social changes being unleashed in new media. Both stress the internet's genesis in 60s counterculture and its historic ethos of sticking it to The Man. Both revel in the fact that new web-based social tools help single mothers looking online for social networks or pro-democracy campaigners in Belarus. Neither sufficiently realises that these tools and these rhetorics can just as readily be co-opted by The Man.

Worse yet, both authors have produced books that are hardly exemplars of the mass collaboration they affect to champion. At least Leadbeater has the wit to qualify his byline, adding ("And 257 other people"). But the fact that these two men are writing books surely shows they are the equivalent of the Abbot of Sponheim: they support We-think in word, but betray it in deed.

To be fair, Leadbeater also encourages readers to put more references into the wiki version of his book's bibliography. In fact, if you go to wethinkthebook.net/home.aspx you could probably undermine his whole thesis by littering it with a few judicious "nots". But you really shouldn't. And anyway, he could always go back and delete them. Then you could re-insert them. On and on until one of you found something better to do.

And the bad news? It's not just journalists who are doomed. If Shirky and Leadbeater are right, most professions will be undermined by web-based social tools in similarly harrowing ways. You too could go the way of the late-15th-century scribes. So don't look so smug.
Topics

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Review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and We-Think by Charles Leadbeater

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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky 325pp, Allen Lane, £20 We-Think by Charles Leadbeater 290pp, Profile, £12.99 First the good news. It won't be long before borderline illiterate half-wit blowhards like me, with our fat salaries, expense-account lifestyles and stranglehold on the means of expression, become obsolete.

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Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

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Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.

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Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships: with others, with ourselves, with it.

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"Face-to-face conversation usually refers to a verbal interaction between two people in the same place. However, to what extent does the term face-to-face conversation apply to digital forms of communication such as video telephony?"