🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi, Dave!  Glad you quit lurking and jumped in!

In article <1991Jan24.193942.8468@siia.mv.com> drd@siia.mv.com (David Dick) writes:
>
>Of course emotional content can be carried by normal text!  Read
>any good novels lately?  The problem is that cramming emotional
>content into text is very time-consuming--good writing is *hard*.

Agreed.  That's why the use of more bandwidth to convey audio and video
is such a popular idea.  "Everybody knows" that just being oneself is
much easier than writing.

>There seems to be an assumption that conveying emotion can be
>made easier by making the bandwidth larger.  

See above.

>That helps to some
>extent but I would like to remind everyone that a few people are
>much better conversationalists than the rest of us, even when we
>all have "full" bandwidth.  

Ah!  Now *there's* the rub!!!!!
I was going to bring this up in a separate message immediately after
my previous one, but forgot, so I'm glad you brought this up.

For some of us, the use of that extra bandwidth will be a handicap,
not a benefit!  There are any number of reasons -- vocal qualities
(harsh voice, nasal voice, difficult accent, amusing accent, speech
impediment), physical appearance (age, sex, race or color, facial
disfigurement), anomalies in body language (nervous tic, perpetual
frown, blank stare when concentrating) -- all can contribute to 
conveying the *wrong* emotional content.

>And we sometimes have inappropriate or embarassing emotions that 
>we don't want to convey (e.g., this is sure boring, but I better 
>continue to listen).  

Indeed.

>Maybe rather than the picture on/off switch 
>for our future videophone-equivalents we'll need a bandwidth slide 
>switch (text on one end, full senses on the other end), depending 
>on how revealing we want to be :-)

Of course, in text we can hide all these things in the low bandwidth.
Or, if we are skilled writers, we can pretend to emotions that we
don't really have.

I foresee a time when full audio/video is the norm, and
    a.	turning down the bandwidth as Dave suggested will be considered
	an admission of hiding something; 
    b.	faked representations will become common;  and
    c.	the richer you are, the more convincing your faked representations
	can be.


At the moment, the crudeness of our software (text only) 
and the limitations of our hardware (low bandwidth)
tend to be equalizers, giving those of us with any combination of
the limitations I mentioned above the chance to present our views
on an equal footing with those without those limitations.
Those of us who wish to be convincing by dint of logic, or at least
the appeal of our *ideas* find this especially beneficial.

This is sort of half-way in the direction of (as I percieve it)
Nick's goal of having the strength of the facts speak for themselves.

Of course, the current situation *does* place a premium on being able
to *write*.  Those of us who write well fare better in this medium
than those who don't.  This is sometimes just as unfortunate as the
situation where those who are mellifluous, or beautiful, or powerful
fare better than those who aren't.

Another time, we can discuss the advantages and disadvantages to
various people of the *delay* in this medium, and how different
people will have the advantage as connectivity and bandwidth move
us more in the direction of real-time interactions vs the current
'batched' interactions.

-- Kenn Goutal
...!linus!intrbas!kenn
...!uunet!intrbas!kenn