I have just stumbled across a great blog by Ernie the Attorney.
In a post entitled What've got here is a failure to communicate, he discusses the signal/noise ratio in email and blogging.
As we all know, apparent failure to communicate is a very common pattern of social interaction. Sometimes the POSIWID principle starts to look like the only explanation - the purpose of a communication is the effect it produces. Followers of Bateson (including the founders of NLP) sometimes make a related claim: the meaning of a communication is its effect. For example, although there are many blogs that contain good material (including Ernie's), it sometimes seems as if the various sociotechnical amplifiers that we use to link blogs together are only designed to produce noise. That's a great pity.
Update: Ernie now has four posts on communication failure.
- What we've got here is a failure to communicate (July 2004)
- What we have here is an inability to communicate (October 2005)
- Failure to communicate (January 2009)
- What we (usually) have is a failure to communicate (May 2010)
My related posts
- Wifi in New Orleans - Katrina (October 2005)
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