Geekpost: #bcmem Musings on Communicative Bandwidth

So I'm sitting there listening to @willmurphy's excellent presentation on adapting to technological change here at Barcamp. He's talking about improvements in communications technology through out the twentieth century and he kinda breezes past the idea of the of the train and the automobile as communications innovations. I think there's a point to be made there that not a lot of people spend time on, especially in technology circles since the car is fairly old tech.

What the car did that no other piece of technology has been able to replicate is allow for independent channels of individual communication that support extraordinarily broad communicative bandwidth. That is to say, that the sort of communication that happens when a car transports an individual (or group of individuals) is that it takes with them the complete richness of their ability to communicate... complete verbal and non-verbal cues, responsiveness and fidelity. Communication in person is as rich as communication can ever possibly be and it seems to me that every "revolution" in communications technology since is trying to find a sweet spot between sustainability (which the car is not) and communicative bandwidth.

To those ends, I think Web 2.0 may be starting to hit if not "the" sweet spot then at least a very good sweet spot:

* Twitter offers breadth instead of depth as a replacement for loss of bandwidth.
* Youtube supports easy, short form video for increased communicative bandwitdh in easily digestible chunks.
* As blogging matures as a writing form in its own right, the ability of writers to condense while still using hypertext for depth is improving.

I'm not sure that we'll see a true replacement to the richness of the in person communicative experience (at least until holo-immersion becomes a reality), but I find that I'm enjoying more an more technologies attempts to adapt.

Further thoughts on the Pirillo/Drupal thing (Geekpost)

Starting here, we join a conversation in my head already in progress:

I actually think the project is a great idea; I see incredible potential applications on the micro (niche) level (e.g. in the enterprise, social action networks, etc.). My problem is that some of the coverage of it I've seen and heard so far seems to spin it as "soon anyone can launch their own Facebook or Digg" which is great except that no piece of software is going to deliver you the several million eyeballs to go along with it.

That's not to say that you couldn't combine parts in a new and interesting way (I'm all about the mashups), but at least part of what make Facebook and Digg what they are is a) innovation and b) position in the market. There are literally hundreds of companies that will sell you the code to put up your own auction site but, for better or worse, there's still just one E-bay.

Delivering functionality with a minimum of fuss is fantastic; I truly believe that. I just hope the project steers towards making the core Drupal experience more user friendly rather than simply a faster way to deliver the latest Web 2.0 widget.