Re: Voice Economics

Tom Whore (tomwhore@inetarena.com)
Fri, 16 Oct 1998 16:14:37 -0700 (PDT)


On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:

> How does the average person decide whether to write a letter, pick up
> the phone, send an email, etc. With digital media you can now
> broadcast, multicast, pointcast, etc, not everybody needs to do
> everything. What dollar premium are you willing to pay to handle
> full-humanplex communications and do you need it all the time?
>

A good point.

Price verus performance has always been, and i think for a large part of
our existence , will always be a trade off when it comes to
communications.

Consider, the ways in which we communicate even with full on full
himanplex is still not enough to fully get our thoughts across. It would
take a point to point mapping of not just thoughts but emotive staes to
get the richness of a thought over to another being.

It still amzes me that we can even get as close as we can to sharing
emotive thought and ideas.

Back to the point at hand though. For the most part voice alone is often
enough to share emotions if share a common set of emotive cues and
refferences. Inflection, phrases, pauses, pitch, tempo and the like can
all go a long way in transmittng emotions if both parties have common
definitions (or close aproximations).

Such that Anger=raised volume+speed up of tempo+clipped explitives.

Now, if both parites or all parties do not share a common base of
definitions more may be needed. Often this is a face to face or full body
contact meeting. Also, when dealing with groups the dynamics can become
increasingly complex.

So yes, I do agrees that there are many instances where pure voice or word
communications are enough to transmit ideas, but at times there needs to
be more. For instance, imagine you were hearing this being spoken as I
looked at you crosseyed and did my best Jerry Lewis..alot.with the memes
of words making sense very little on the lisst mailing to people for
converstaion heyyyy rooohitt.