Soundless Conversation

I'm almost to the point of Facebook use that I will start interacting with people I don't really know. Up to now, it has been with people I know, or expanded to people I don't see regularly.



It's odd. I'm still not sure how I care for this new medium. I send e-mails and compose documents for a living. Part of what I have always lectured folks on is the importance of how your e-mail will be received - as words only, not with the inflection you intended, not with you to explain the meaning and nuances, not for them to observe your reaction. It's just the words.

In a way, this communication form presumes that. To truly work, it assumes that I know you, know how you are, know why you would kid or not, know a back history. I find it very hard to fathom that I could have anything other than a meaningful "chat" with someone with whom I had no frame of reference.

Ah, but you blog, I hear you say. True enough. But blogs - most blogs - are not conversations, they are complete thought sets (at least in theory). Over time, one gets to the "sense" of a blog and its author. The good ones, there is a sense that what they write and who they are inside are one.

The other part that truly bothers me about the communication form is its silence. I am a man that prefers silence to noise - true enough. At the same time, when I am talking, I want to talk: be in the conversation, engage in communication. With this format, especially carrying out a conversation at any length, there is just the clickety click of the keys as I type, the soundless wait for reaction, and then clickety click click of response.

It strikes me as odd that this form of "communication" is actually silent; almost a soulless kind of chat, conveying meaning without form. And without the form, without a way to frame the communication it becomes like a river, guided between banks and useful or out of it's dike and flood, ravaging the land and destroying life.