Lilia follows the flow of a conversation on Online communication tools: designed for a group, experienced by an individual as expressed by Nancy White in Don't Practice? Watch your Preachin!:
My experience is not your experience. Further more, it is hard to even describe OUR experience. We romanticize the concept of group interaction, but in truth, it is imperfect, online and offline. And online we don't see the consequences as quickly nor are our communication antennae, trained for millennium to F2F communication, as attuned to online communication. I think we are getting better. I see changes. But I can't see if you are smiling, frowning, curious or pissed off as you read this. And if I want to communicate and engage with you, that matters to me. (If I just want to spout and publish, well, you are out of luck!)
We think of online communication and community tools as something that groups use to work together. While this is true, people use these tools in isolation from the rest of the group. All the non-verbal communication that happens in face-to-face groups is lost completely in these settings. How should this impact the way these systems are designed? Maybe we shouldn't be designing them for "group experience," but for better individual experience. The goal is to enable everyone to participate, and to allow individuals to work as effectively as possible.
And this ties fairly nicely with Lilia's previous post on You can't participate in life via conference call
I couldn't leave it unnoticed: Martin Dugage, you can't participate in life via conference call
[snip]I guess it's not about tools we use, it's about pace: you can't connect with others at sixty-five miles an hour. You can't learn about a city jumping here and there in a packaged tour, you can't became friends in half an hour... Weblogs may mediate presence, but connecting with others still takes time as pregnancy takes nine month...
[17 July: Updated to clarify the ownership of quotes in this thread.]