Virtual Conversation is an Oxymoron

James Hague – No Comment:

“Here’s a lesson I learned very early on after I started working full-time as a programmer (and that’s a peculiar sentence for me to read, as I no longer program for a living). I’d be looking at some code at my desk, and it made no sense. Why would anyone write it like this? There’s an obvious and cleaner way to approach the same problem. So I’d go down the hall to the person who wrote it in the first place and start asking questions…and find out that I didn’t have the whole picture, the problem was messier than it first appeared, and there were perfectly valid reasons for the code being that way. This happened again and again. Sometimes I did find a real flaw, but even then it may have only occurred with data that wasn’t actually possible (because, for example, it was filtered by another part of the system). Talking face to face changed everything, because they could draw diagrams, pull out specs, and give concrete examples.”

“Social Media” is a crock. Comments and online interactions only make sense as an introduction (or a follow up) to a real conversation. Talmud or Plato were notes of the real conversations. Online comments, especially comments without authorship is a bitter molasses. On my old blog I had regular readers and regular commentators. I patiently waited for some of them to take the conversation off line. When I realized that they wanted to remain distant and anonymous the conversations became empty. Human culture will always be defined by live forums and I mean “live” and then there is the opposite of “live”.