I had a very interesting conversation last night with a friend who is an engineer by trade. We were discussing the quality of communication on the web. He kind of fell out of love with the internet over the “dotbomb” when chat, instant messenging, and forums were the de facto forms of communication on the internet.

His underlying point was the quality of communication has degraded with the advent of the internet. He’s a brilliant individual and brought up many valid points. But, being a geek, I really couldn’t agree with him. It would unravel my whole world.

This is a bit of a long windy one, read on if you dare.

The whole, “the web 2.0 is about people,” mantra has been drilled several times over and I am not pretending to bring up anything new. My friend was making generalizations based on his own experiences. I don’t think his experiences go past, “web 1.0.” I can’t imagine using hotmail for x many years and giving it up before gmail, only to say “web-based email sucks.”

Anyhow, what initially got me into the internet (aside from being miserable at baseball) was all of the free music and chatrooms (Chathouse baby). Pre-Napster in the Scour Media Agent days, I found out that I loved the internet. People who don’t really know this stuff would say I am a computer geek. I could care less about a computer disconnected from the internet. I am an internet geek! So what’s the point? Why do I love the internet and implicitly state it?

I suppose I never really thought about it much until this conversation, but I love the internet for the communication and the sharing of information (which is essentially communication in its own right). So when my friend began attacking the very foundation of the internet, I became engaged.

As I mentioned earlier, the quality of communication obviously degrades with the internet. Occasionally I videochat with those who have macs and isights, but beyond that it is text-based. And there is not a polished standard for communicating tone through text. Although I do feel like I am being yelled at when I see big red text or all caps. (As a rule of thumb, when I am on the receiving end of this type of email, I usually wait to reply, and then give that person the benefit of the doubt, they really weren’t shouting at me. Usually this works to keep things smooth.)

In the short run, I think the degradation is apparent, as well as the lack of tone. But we fool ourselves thinking we have it all figured out. Body language is the easiest to spread across human nature and say, “oh we’re like this.” Spoken language is slightly different and has not been around as long. Rapid text based communication is twenty years old. Of course there is a lack of understanding.

My friend has given up on it, or perhaps he never really tried. I hope this next boom/bubble gets people as excited as me. Finally things are becoming relavant. Search Engine Algorithms will continue to evolve and so will the those trying to make money off of them. The communities are what get me excited. I subscribe to del.icio.us feeds relative to my field. All of you do my go-getting for me, and it’s completely unbiased and exactly what I want. It’s decentralized with no pie-in-the-sky media type deciding what is relevant and what is not. There is no filtering. I can’t imagine if everyone in the world subscribed to feeds relevant what they did on a daily basis, or even what they were interested in. (Ahhh the utopia.)

This has been longer than my usual posts, and may have digressed from my main point a bit, but I really felt the need to bring some of this stuff up. We are only going to learn more about text-based communication, and those of us who put all of this time into the web, do it, not because we are losers with bad communication skills (for the most part) and “waste” our time looking at porn (for the most part) and playing World of Warcraft (which merits it’s own post about what defines friends and communication), we do it because we love communication, sharing of information, and we are passionate (pats meself on the back) about it.

Last words to my friend: get a flickr account, a last.fm account, a del.icio.us account, subscribe to some rss feeds, and write a couple blog posts relevant to your field, this is all about communication and knowledge.

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