Conversation power

Often wonder at the relative merits of conversation vs. connection - If I'm connecting, I'm not conversing most times. Clearly there is a rhythm and trade-off between establishing and maintaining weak links, reading, personal learning and engaging in dialog. Knowledge creation and exchange requires a deeper dialog than the social banter needed to build social capital, it needs the energy of creative abrasion and the engagement of reciprocity to change deep level assumptions and unarticulated mental models.

Paul Hertzog explores the way exchanges allows strong memes to rise to the top and suggests a conversation allows mingling, sorting and reforming of ideas, insights and explicit thoughts.

Deep dialog is indeed a very fundamental knowledge practice.

Been exploring podcasting as a way to distribute ideas, increase awareness and package insights. So far I have not seen a format that effectively delivers the JIT knowledge byte. What appears to be missing is the medium for a real conversation - sure we can attach audio files to blogs and enable comments, but that is not the same as having a conversation, capturing annotation or enabling an exchange 'on the go'.

Wonder if we will see emergent affordances to allow verbal annotation, commentary or easy feedback in the podcast medium?- it would surely make more powerful 'conversation'.

Comments

[Nirmala]

Nice post, Denham. It got me thinking really hard as to whether I just connect with people or converse with them. I guess one needs to have matching wavelengths with the other parties involved to converse easily, else it gets a lot more challenging and perhaps remains just a weak connection. I agree with Shawn - we don't seem to find the time to relax and connect, let alone converse. The benefits are not seen. We don't respect each other so much that we feel the need to converse...and more importantly see any great ideas coming from such conversations...and also, we rarely are able to trace back an idea to its origin...

[Mike]

I'd like to see a more "social version" of a tool like imarkup that allows the digital annotation of web based content including allowing you to leave audio annotations. I know that efforts in the past were abandoned because they were deemed graffiti (third voice) but I think times have changed.

[Bryan]

I've always liked your classification of blogs as second-order social software, and wonder to what extent podcasts fall into this category. There's a larger speedbump or hurdle to cross than there is in, say, good discussion tools or wikis.

When I listen to podcasts outside of the blog environment, I feel that speedbump grow. For example, if I want to respond to a point but am walking with an iPod or driving and listening from my laptop, there's no immediate response venue. Are podcasts third-order social software?

[Shawn Callahan]

Excellent observation about the trade off between conversation and connection. I just has breakfast with a couple of people whom I normally connect with but found after about 10 minutes we were deep in conversation. I expect time is key here. In our world that values busy-ness (hmmm sounds like bus-i-ness) people don't seem to be able to relex in order to enjoy a conversation.