Multiple Bodies? Parallel Discussions online.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Digital Conversations and Conversational ‘Cloning’
In my last post I wrote some thoughts about how strange our communication has become in the age of the internet. The cultural and interpersonal technologies have developed side-by-side with our engineered technologies, and yet we rarely acknowledge them.
This post is a continuation on my last post Two-Way Digital Communication as a Temporal Extension. In a discussion I had about that last post I realized I missed a very critical genre of digital communication, the parallel discussion. Because there is not just one way of communicating digitally, these tools have been developed by many companies and people for different purposes. Each of these tools have different aesthetics and User Interfaces, and I touched a little bit on how something like email suggests a different kind of conversation than a text message.
Something interesting happens at the intersection of temporally loose communication and functionally similar, aesthetically different tools. Not only can you have many private conversations with different people in parallel, you can have entirely separate discussions with the same person in parallel. It is not uncommon for me to be making plans with someone over text while discussing some funny posts I saw on Instagram. This is an increasingly common phenomena as more people spend a larger portion of their time communicating digitally.
Even though its common, it is so strange when you break it down. To translate this type of conversation into in-person communication, it is the equivalent of having every few words swap conversations, and your partner completely understanding. I’m going to attempt to type out what a parallel digital conversation would sound like if you had one in-person.
A: “Does 7:00 on Friday sound good for you? Here is a funny image I saw that reminded me of us.”
B: “7:00 Friday doesnt work, I’m getting off of work late, could you do 8?”
A: “8 is good for me! It’s a new place that my boss recommended to me, I’ve never had it but its supposed to be delicious.”
B: “Haha that is so funny! That reminds me a lot of this other image I saw”
A: “Haha!”
B: “Sounds good, I’m looking forward to dinner.”
How on earth do we manage to do this nearly all of the time? Is it a matter of being offsetting some part of your short term memory to the memory of the app? Is it some kind of Pavlovian training that when I open Instagram I am now in a funny image mood rather than a serious discussion mood? I don’t know the answer.
Another weird subsection of parallel discussion is the Side-Groupchat. The ability to have defined conversations with a group of people all at once, and have side discussions with any number of those members privately (whether just one person for clarification or everyone but one person on the more unfortunate end) is a type of communication that is so clearly different from the way that we interact in the real world. There is an assumption of honesty in a group chat that simply isnt true. It’s kind of similar to having an inside joke or a secret, except you can make and share them as the conversation is going on without anyone else knowing.
I spent a lot of time on my last post trying to come up with a very artistic conclusion statement, but I don’t have much more to add here. If anyone has any other thoughts or prior research papers about media-studies and the digital conversational landscape feel free to share.