Recent Features
| |||||||||||||
Voice is overratedVoice is overratedPosted Feb 22, 2007 23:33 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (guest, #15888)Parent article: Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet)
Voice has drawbacks: it's too synchronous, it's evanescent, it disturbs other people in the area, it can be overheard, etc, etc.
Hell, at work I'll sometimes IM the guy in the next cube with a question rather than talk to him -- he (or me) might already be on the phone or in the middle of something else, he can answer my message when he gets a chance, it isn't going anywhere.
Ditto the reverse -- I hate being interrupted by the phone when someone could just as easily have IM'd or emailed me.
Click to ring both phones? Hell no.
(Log in to post comments)
Voice is overrated Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:08 UTC (Fri) by jhardin (guest, #3297) [Link] +1
Voice comms can be *very* intrusive.
Voice is overrated Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:18 UTC (Fri) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] Indeed. They seem to totally miss the advantages of text above speech. Text is asynchronous and voice isn't.
For me it's also much easier to write English than to speak it. No idea how true that is for other non-native English speakers. It probably is easier for the observer though.
Especially in a "globalized" environment Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:48 UTC (Fri) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] Sadly I find myself needing to use chat with a few of my colleagues in India. No offense intended, but a couple of them have accents that are so thick that I just can't understand them via voice ... but their writing is generally much better.
(Of course I try to be circumspect and tactful about the issue --- and it's really only that extreme with a couple of them, roughly half of our workforce ... ~5K employees and contractors, are located in or recent immigrants from other countries. But still ...)
Especially in a "globalized" environment Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:30 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It's the reason we are not using phone here at all - unless it's emergency. We DO use VC often, and it helps immensely, but of course before you'll call someone by videophone you'll contact him via IM first (because videophone is even more intrusive the normal phone).
Offtopic globalisation rant Posted Feb 23, 2007 14:45 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Talking to the friendly people in the Indian call centres which operate all the Australian telcos these days can be amusing. Today I had to correct a misspelling over and over -- the lady repeatedly heard my Aussie letter 'I' as an 'A'. 'I for India' overcame the problem and provoked laughter.
It does really irritate me, though, when personal names are faked to make foreign customers more 'comfortable' -- we're just not that insular anymore, no country is. I know and she knows that her name is not 'Kylie'! Lately I've met more Divitas and Bharats, which is pleasing, but some call centres persist in the lie.
Reminds me of My Fair Lady :-) Posted Mar 3, 2007 2:07 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Eliza Doolitle: Didn't ah sy that? Professor Higgins: No, Eliza, you didn't sigh that, you didn't even "say" that. - From the Audrey Hepburn/Rex Harrison movie My Fair Lady.) No disrespect intended. I totally value cultural diversity.
Voice is overrated Posted Feb 23, 2007 13:33 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] It's easier for me to write than speak, and I'm a native English speaker! (Mind you, most speakers don't have stammering *and* slurring to contend with...)
also Posted Feb 23, 2007 3:49 UTC (Fri) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link] text is logged, can be searched - it's taking minutes of a conversation rather than the conversation itself, which, in the technical world, is generally preferable
Voice is overrated Posted Feb 23, 2007 9:48 UTC (Fri) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link] Sometimes e-mails take a lot or a huge amount of back and forths when terminology or goals or understanding of context is not shared. Whenever I feel an issue is headed that way I prefer to converse by phone. Text may be asynchronous, but voice is interruptible.
Establishing vocabulary is useful Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:29 UTC (Fri) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328) [Link] I like email communication for exactly this reason. I cannot count the number of times that I've watched groups of very smart people supposedly come to agreement via voice discussions either in person or on teleconferences. But then, when the real details get written down you find that there was no consensus but only the usual fake, politic evasion of conflict that is what society has developed as the basis for most speech.
Specifically, I like email communication used to convey essays and documents. The use of email for one-line "instant replies" and cheering is just about as useless as those famous two-minute phone calls to "touch base".
The problem is that written communication often fails due to the number of people promoted to positions of importance who have absolutely appalling communication skills. If they cannot brow-beat and evade responsibility through ambiguous yet "assertive" discussions, they're completely at a loss. So they encourage an evasive culture around them, and you end up with an organization paralyzed and unable to actually communicate anything.
Establishing vocabulary is useful Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:37 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Surprisingly enough I have totally different view of such discussions. Usually they are very productive and useful where I work. May be because leader must write summary of agreements reached in such discussion and send it to all participants via email afterwards ? Kind of hard to evade responsibility or conflict when you know that result of discussion must be written by you personally (no matter what others are saying it's leader's responsibility to put words "on paper") and that it'll be visible by all participants and will be archived forever...
Establishing vocabulary is vital Posted Feb 24, 2007 5:46 UTC (Sat) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] I can't begin to count the number of times I've had to bring technical discussions to a momentary halt to define a word or phrase. Often two people in seeming agreement (or conflict) are assigning different, perfectly reasonable, meanings to the same word.Another problem is pronouns. `That', `it', `he', &c., are obvious to the speaker, but often not to the hearers. One of the two smartest people I ever met (Hi, Ziggy!) was so egregious that, instead of using a sentence or phrase to ask for clarification, I just took to interjecting ``antecedents!'' every minute or two, whereupon he'd backtrack and disambiguate. It always struck me as odd that such problems arise so often among engineers, whose jobs demand precision. Clearing up those misunderstandings almost requires synchronous, voice, communication. If such an error becomes established in text, it can invalidate days of effort before being corrected.
|
|||||||||||||