I was ruminating as to why skype never became twitter (or facebook for that matter) earlier today. It’s communication vs community, I understand. I am more interested in why one takes an existing paradigm to a new medium while the other creates a new paradigm in the new medium. I was carrying out this rumination on my wall in facebook wondering why I didn’t have a wall in skype to do the same thing. It seems like it might be easier for skype to build more of the features of facebook than for facebook to build more of the features of skype. It may be too late for skype to do that though (although re-creating yelp in skype does seem to have some promise). It’s just that so many of our behaviors have been segmented by isolated technologies for so long that we don’t quite know what to do when these technologies merge. Although it does seem like the behaviors are somewhat invariant. Sebastien turned me onto an old NY Times article about the growth of the telephone around 1917. That got me to digging a bit more and I found this article on the growth of the telephone service. I thought the descriptions of how the phone seemed to “used unnecessarily” and even “abused” as well as that its “sharp alarm jars on the nerves” and its “insistent demands” are “very wearing”. Sounds like a twitter morning.
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[...] more proof? Michael Bauer found a 1901 New York Times article talking about a new growing technology called the telephone. [...]
[...] more proof? Michael Bauer found a 1901 New York Times article talking about a new growing technology called the telephone. “No [...]