Jede Kommunikation besteht aus einem Mitteilungs- und einem Beziehungsaspekt. Das bedeutet, dass nicht nur der Inhalt einer Nachricht den Sinn der Nachricht bestimmt, sondern auch, wer kommuniziert und wie kommuniziert wird. Der Satz

kann als Aussage sehr unterschiedlich gemeint sein – sowohl vernichtend als auch wohlwollend. Den Buchstaben sieht man das nicht an. Die Tonlage, in welcher der Satz geäußert wurde, würde wichtige Informationen enthalten, so auch beispielsweise, wer ihn äußert (die Chefin oder ein Kollege).

Aber es ist nicht so, dass mit der Schriftsprache solche Informationen überhaupt nicht mitgeteilt werden können. Natürlich sind hier zunächst die Smileys zu nennen. Eher wohlwollend ist dieselbe Bemerkung gemeint, wenn sie Smileys wie die folgenden enthält:

Dieser Entwurf ist ganz schön lückenhaft, aber wir werden ihn verwenden.

Der folgende Form ist dann schon erheblich bedrohlicher:

Soweit also ein kleiner Einblick in das schriftliche Sprachhandeln.

Was sagt ihr zu dem oben dargestellten Bild? Glaubt ihr, solch eine Machtkommunikation ist im Internet nicht möglich? Ihr täuscht euch. Das eben Dargestellte ist nur ein Vorgeschmack dessen, was möglich ist. Dass der Chef einfach so hinter den Schreibtisch tritt, dazu gibt es Äquivalente bei der Online-Kommunikation. Man denke nur mal an jene, die auch am Wochenende E-Mails erhalten und von denen erwartet wird, dass sie noch vor Montag darauf reagieren. INVADE THE TERRITORY OF LOWER-STATUS PERSONNEL, nennt Gerald Goldhaber dieses ‘hinter-den-Schreibtisch-Treten’. Umgemünzt auf die Online-Welt heißt das: den privaten ZeitRAUM besetzen – nämlich das Wochenende.

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Foto aus Goldhaber, G.M.: Organizational Communication, Wm.C. Brown, Dubuque, USA.

The social of social software has still not being captured comprehensively, yet. Why is that? Social aspects of communication are relevant for implementation as well as for design. They are pretty well investigated in principle. This blog series likes to fill some knowledge gaps towards this issue. Lets start with the relation between Turn-Taking and design.

The design of an enterprise microblogging platform affects the mode of how and about what we communicate. Why? Easy: Because like with face-to-face interaction using social software is determined by informal rules that shape our behavior.

We know from interaction research the following example:

1.       Someone who is speaking can single out the next speaker.

2.       If he isn’t doing that, another person may single himself out.

3.       If nothing happens, the current speaker may speak further.

4.       If nothing happens, rule 2 follows again.

Simple interaction rules that accompany us all the day. And we are able to follow them. If someone breaks them (e.g. by interrupting) there will occur a crisis of interaction – at least a tiny one.

So, what are the rules in WWW? How can I make somebody answer me or take a note about my utterances? I can do it myself: ‘please answer me!’ or: ‘What do you think?’ However, in a subtle way social software design will do it for us, too.

Where does this happen very well at the moment? With Facebook and Yammer. Because here we have a thread structure and beneath it the invitation to answer (‘write a comment’, see picture). There is no klick too much, no function too much. Writing-Sending, that’s it. That is the right way. Because if I need to raise my hands to tell something I may let it go. So, if I need to go into a menu to find the function to answer, or if I only have to do a klick too much, I may let it go.

Subtle as it is, it will have effects. For we are in an interaction mode when we are in social networks. Likewise the fact that the write-a-comment field has only one line. It speaks to me as follows: “Come on, write! Just a few words! They will do it.”

Additionally: The Like-Button (see the picture) causes similar effects. It may be compared with face-to-face interaction as well. The thumb-up sign has to be taken seriously. It simulates gesture and mimics that play an immense important role in face-to-face interaction. While in such interactions take a second and observe the importance of gesture and mimics and how it orders the way conversation happens. Well, it’s all about conversation, in WWW as well.

And why do such phenomena from the real world take effect in WWW? I will show the next time.

(Source of picture: www.photoxpress.com)

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Everybody speaks about Twitter, even with respect to communication within firms. Products like Yammer or Communote, that serve for professional microblogging within organisations and corporations, show that there is a demand. The newest collaboration suites start to implement microblogging functionality, too.

In order to get a satisfying answer to the question, why the communication principle of microblogging is successful we should look to some principles of human communication. I start with the following question: Why is communication very often improbable? And I will connect it with microblogging: How can microblogging help to cope with this issue?

What is ‘improbable communication’?

Niklas Luhmann, probably Germany’s most important contemporary sociologist (died in 1998), stated that communication is improbable per se (in Soziologische Aufklärung III, 1981,  p.31). This, however, seems to be a contradiction to Paul Watzlawick’s famous sermon “It is not possible to not communicate”.

For Watzlawick each kind of behaviour is communication, i.e. it consists of sending some messages that can be observed by others. Try, for example, being in an elevator with somebody foreign and not to communicate. You will not be lucky because everything you are doing will send some signals that are ready for interpretation by the other.

However, Luhmann does not mean this kind of communication as it is a very broad definition of communication and, important for us in terms of digital social media, because it means physical presence. I, however, want to talk about physical absence, which is typical for microblogging.

According to Luhmann, a communicative act may be called ‘finished’ if there is some kind of success from the viewpoint of the sender, i.e. if it is accepted by the receiver. In order to happen there are three conditions neccessary:

1. The message has to attain a potential receiver.
2. The message has to be understood by the receiver.
3. The communicative act has to be accepted by the receiver.

Sounds trivial but these three conditions to happen is not easy. Rather, it happens that communication fails because it does not meet all of those conditions.  What do I mean by saying ‘failing’? My point is, that ordinarily we do not care about the fails, moreover, that we do not even notice them. And pointing to the latter opens up a window behind which we may observe a huge amount of potential: It could happen much more successful communication, if we would notice the conditions of successful communication.

Microblogging and the 3 Conditions of Communication

ad 1. Attaining a Message and ‘Barriers of Discouragement’

Consider a situation in a firm. A conversation of Mr X with colleague A has no consequences for the sake of the firm. But if colleague B had been present, the consequences would have been positive because there would have been conducted important actions. The problem here is that the sender (Mr X) does not know that colleague A is not the right receiver for this message, nor that for the same conversation it would have been important to have B present.

This kind of opacity happens very often and only rarely there are adequate measures to solve it. The problem now is that the sender Mr X knows this. In the following this very uncertainty of Mr X establishes barriers of discouragement (”Schwellen der Entmutigung” with Luhmann in German). What happens is that many communicative acts do not happen – even if they were important.

Twitter, or rather microblogging, is a tool to face exactly the problem of opacity by giving a sender the means to blow messages out in the blue. It lowers the barrier to write messages and offers an important new communication channel.  Maybe colleague B would have got this message, either by following the sender or by fulltext search, or by hashtag search, etc.

ad 2. Understanding a Message and Communication Codes

Mankind developed complex languages to cope with the problem of understanding. But to understand language we need to know the life-world in which this language is used – the context. So, in order to understand a message we need to have some context information. This counts for conversations, in written text and even more so with Twitter due to the 140 character restriction.

So the second point of Luhmann’s three-fold model is not the one, microblogging could fix. On the contrary. It might be the only thing that makes it difficult to use Twitter. For newbies it is not easy to encrypt Twitter-posts, because the character restriction per post does not allow for writing context information.

However, other microblogging systems allow more than 140 characters. The difficulty here is: what lengths is acceptable for a realtime-device like Microblogging. If the texts are very long, then we do not have a microblog but a blog.

Our suggestion for developers is to implement some soft limitations. We think, for example, of a description field that, maybe after 400 characters, starts getting darker (or more red) the more characters we write into it. So, the writer get an idea that he/she ’should finish soon’.

ad 3. Accepting/Dismissing a Message and the Sociality of Communication

If a message reaches somebody interested and if this somebody gets the clue of it we have another problem: accepting or dismissing the message. We all know the pain if there is something declined we are saying. But with Luhmann, dismissing means that our message is ignored. To be ignored also connotes painful situations. But with Twitter it is different. We have this issue very often with Twitter because the offer of postings is very big. And it is no problem. Why?

As we have seen in 1, with Twitter  the sender does not know whether his message is being noticed or not. But the barriers to post are so low that he will continue posting.

Moreover, there are even advantages in terms of professional communication within firms or organisations. Consider the disadvantages of E-Mail and Instant Messaging (IM) that the receiver of a message always has to answer. To get silently the message would be rude. This is not the case with microblogging. This is a relief for the receiver: he, for instance, need not to answer under time pressure. This is a big disadvantage of IM. Very often communication by IM is not productive because we meet just the need to maintain our relationship but nothing above this (i.e. phatic communication, which, by the way, in its community building function nevertheless is very important for microblogging).

The fact that microblogging-posts can be ignored without having negative consequences makes it a communication device that may hinder conflicts that occur with other Web 2.0 tools.

What next?

As seen there is a huge potential to initiate communication that never would happen without tools like microblogging. The rate of communicative acts rises dramatically with these tools. This, for example, is very important for project management where the lack of communication causes many problems.

We at cm|d and our #ubimic Initiative are thinking about what happens if we incorporate machines and sensors: what if human and machines twitter together? Visit our #ubimic Page for further information.