The reams of paper your buy in your office supply store often have pictures on their wrappers illustrating Things You Can Put on Paper: color business charts, pictures of a buff guy water-skiing, newsletters, pictures of colorful hot air balloons, more business charts. This is in case you weren’t quite sure what paper is used for. I’m just surprised that they don’t say in small print: “Serving suggestion. Actual pages are blank.”

I felt a bit the same way at a forum at MIT I participated in last night. Panelists and audience members tried to characterize what the Web is used for and how it is used. Are Internet conversations degraded forms? Sure, came the response, just look at the stupidity of the chats at Yahoo. And then I’m tempted to reply: But look at the intelligence of the mailing lists you’re on, yada yada yada. The argument is as pointless as whether most real world conversations are stupid or not.

The Web is what it is. It is what we are.

Yet, I do think there are some types of generalizations one can make based on the nature of the medium itself: Web conversations are almost always mediated by a keyboard. There are no fists that can punch us if we go overboard. There is no immediate feedback in a group conversation equivalent to the antsy shifting in chairs or furrowed brows one sees when talking in the real world. And, of course, the temporality of Web conversations is hugely different from real world ones: I did a chat yesterday on Richard Seltzer’s Samizdat site and in typical fashion, questions and answers overlapped in a jumble of threads that looked like a kitten had been playing with it.

From characteristics such as these we can make some generalizations about Web conversations. For example, the intermittency of many forms of Web conversations means that the replies can be more carefully constructed than in most real world conversations. But does that make Web conversations more accurate or more artificial? And the lack of immediate feedback can lead people to exaggerate their positions just to get people to acknowledge they’ve heard it. But does this mean that people adopt more extreme positions or that they pronounce them with more distance?

In any case, this doesn’t address the issue when someone says, “Internet conversations are like professional wrestling.” The answer to that question can only be: Yes, sometimes, but so what? There are greasy spoons, 5-star restaurants and picnics. What sense does it make to characterize what eating is like? And, by the way, what do people put on paper?

Categories: Uncategorized dw