The Spoken Word
In the book “In the Bubble“, John Thackara observes:
Ivan Illich discovered that in the 1930s, nine out of ten words that a man had heard when he reached the age of twenty were words spoken to him directly – one to one, or as a member of a crowd – by somebody whom he could touch and feel and smell. By the 1970s, that proportion had been reversed: About 9 out of ten words heard in a day were spoken through a loudspeaker. “Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets,” Illich said in 1982. For Illich, there was a huge difference between a colloquial tongue – what people say to each other in a context, with meaning and a language uttered by people into microphones.
I think this the last part of this passage is the most revealing – the nature of what people say when they are face to face vs. what they say when speaking into a microphone. The same applies to emails (particularly one to many emails) and blogs. I often hear about how blogs promote people’s “voice”, but what is the quality of that voice when it is directed at a mass audience? Keep this in mind when you are doing a remote demonstration: the medium is the message.