Showing posts with label text-messages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label text-messages. Show all posts

Monday 25 June 2012

What is Pritter's Achilles' heel?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


25 June

Serious or not, I do not believe that it is any more possible to have a debate by Splatter/Twatter than by MSN Messenger: with the latter, because of the immediacy of seeing the other person's reponse, it's all too easy to feel the need to reply quickly (perhaps, more and more quickly) and, sooner or later, say something (or in such a way) that, if interpreted differently, gives rise to offence, defence and even reprisal.

In theory, if the visuals on Skype weren't such rubbish and not in synch, it would be better than a telephone-call. Still, with a conversation by telephone, there is potential for noticing and acting on such cues as inflexion, intonation, breathiness of the voice, involuntary ways of evincing surprise, shock, etc. - you know, all those things that go to make up the 92% in that standard iceberg cod-psychology diagram*, which purports to show how little of the meaning in a face-to-face conversation is in the words. (Oh yes, generalizing diagram? Just try saying 'You're fired!'(or 'Your mother is dead') to someone in a serious voice, and ask how little he or she took from your words!)

As to Pratter, with a character-limit similar to text-messaging's regrettable re-invention of the telegram's pressure on words to save charges, it should be no worse than text-messaging, except that there is an arena, a sort of Big Top: by which I mean that, if I send a text-message to Dr Paul, some time (which may be longer than one expects) it gets to his phone and, one hopes, he reads it and, in his own time, replies (if it needs a reply).


So much holds true for both: I can choose to expend money or time on an extended text-message, just as I can send a follow-up Tweet straight after. What remains (or results) is the fragmentary nature, not just of the correspondence, but also of the means of conducting it (especially on a handheld device), which has the potential, not least when other debates / conversations are going on at the same, for participants not stopping to check what the other person did say before letting go a broadside.

However, telecomms errors and hacking apart, a text-message doesn't go to anyone else's phone, for which read 'is publicly available on Witter - until I choose to delete it - for anyone who decides to do what is weirdly called following me' (sounds like licensed stalking ['Someone's following me' never sounded like a good thing before], but there we go. Here, though, with my debate with Dr Paul, which may involve misunderstandings, misrememberings, misconceptions, all this is (circus again!) being played out before an audience, even if it probably is an audience that couldn't care less, and glances - or scrolls - past**.

I believe that that element of 'dirty washing in public' changes things, both as to the things said, and the desire (albeit resistible) to say things back. Combine that with doing whatever it is in 140 characters, or multiples thereof, and what a mess results!

And who softened the blow / profile of all this under the cunning aegis of calling it all 'social media'? Pratter is a tool that has the potential to be a divisive medium, if not just a repository for endlessly spread links to Internet items or products whose actual worth or interest one cannot judge from the Tweet itself. This sheer advertisement and self-promotion might be better placed on t.v.


End-notes

* Which, as Tomkinson's Schooldays would possibly say, was seen by Potter Minor on a training-course, reproduced afterwards with slightly variant percentages and passed on to Venables, who couldn't read the scribbled figures, but had a guess, and delivered them in a lecture heard by Barnstoneworth, who told Eric Olthwaite...

** Unlike the rubbernecking that gives rise to those dangerous slow-downs on Motorways, as if either the pulled-over police-car with the flashing lights gives a screw about the other drivers' speeds just at that moment, or the sight of a vehicle on its side is inescapably edifying.


Thursday 15 March 2012

Can all text-messages be like this?!

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


15 March

I quote (with editing to protect The Innocent):

Dear Xxxxx, PS To-
day's Wordwang is
Hyperbuadfedenti
alltsmiecc. Don't
spend it all at once!
Ciao, Xxxxx


Saturday 18 February 2012

How's this for a contention?

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


18 February

Messaging isn't talking:

I've known one friend, with whom I regularly swap text-messages, for 15 years, but we still sometimes misunderstand each other.

So I believe that you can't really talk to someone by e-mail or anything like it, if you don't know the person.


Saturday 4 February 2012

Eric Morecambe and the evils of e-mail (2)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


5 February

I was going to come back to this topic of Eric Morecambe, and someone - to-day or yesterday - has been looking, so here goes:

A good deal of Eric Morecambe's stage business, however much of it was actually worked out by Eddie Braben* (rather than, spontaneously or otherwise, by him - as Ernie Wise made a fine art of looking taken aback and confused), revolved around the incongruous: in the Cleopatra play (as in every one of Ernie's plays), although we are in Ancient Egypt, his signature spectacles and no less sock-suspenders are undeniable and out of place.

With the item thrown into the air and caught in the bag, I believed - and still like to believe - that what is tossed up is real, but only leaves a trace by the noise that it makes entering the bag.

There are levels on which e-mail (or a text-message) isn't real, but it betrays its presence in the list of the contents of one's inbox. The phantom e-mail, the one that one could almost swear that one had written (or that one can swear did not reach one's inbox), but it just doesn't show up in the 'sent' folder, is not so far distant from Eric's stone - or coin.

Another incongruous aspect of e-mail is that a person can get so familiar, in a way that - one hopes - he or she wouldn't think (or dare?) to do face to face: e-mailers can burn their bridges, nail colours to their mast, or take pot-shots in a way that, if one could be divorced from the person to whom their messages are directed, would make one wish that they had, instead, made an about face, abandoned ship or sheathed their weapon.

In a way, these hostile - or unexpectedly amorous - exchanges seem, to some people's mentality, to have a different status (and that precisely because they are deemed to happen in that non-existent reality that some call cyberspace). It is as if, in due course, meeting the person to whom the things were written will somehow erase, unwrite, them, or as if both were undisclosed players in an on-line game who encountered each other. Or it's just a bit like - deliberately, who knows? - getting drunk and letting rip.


For what it's worth, my practice is to treat every e-mail that I write as if it were a letter - I remind myself that it could have the same consequences as a letter, and that it should only contain what I would be happy for a letter to contain, and I do so by pausing

* To put the date at the top, and

* Then by addressing the intended recipient properly: 'Dear Helen' or 'Hi, John!'


Whether I am right about the effect that this has (and whether it would work for anyone else - anyone else who hates getting an e-mail (or text-message) that could have been meant for a different person), I do not know, but I do it.

It is a gesture, just like hoping that the stone - or coin - that cannot be seen will land in my waiting paper-bag...



End-notes

* Whose eighty-second birthday falls on Hallowe'en.