Communication and coordination
Explore systems built around feedback and coordination, from face-to-face dialogue to instant messaging, smartphones and conversational assistants. This pathway follows the main changes in chronological order and shows which older practices continued beside them.
How did communication become a shared process rather than a one-way message?
Five turning points
Conversation and dialogue
The historical significance of conversation is not that it allowed humans to produce more messages. It allowed them to interrogate the message while it was still alive.
Open topic →Time-sharing
Users can enter a command, inspect a result, correct an error and continue without waiting for a full batch cycle. One expensive computer can support many users whose bursts of activity rarely consume the processor continuously.
Open topic →Bulletin-board systems, Usenet and Internet chat
Communication moves beyond addressed private mail into communal topics, boards and channels. Names, norms, moderators, archives and recurring participants create social continuity.
Open topic →Instant Messaging and Chat Applications
Users can estimate whether another participant is connected or willing to communicate, although presence is imperfect and performative. Messages can arrive immediately yet wait when a recipient is offline.
Open topic →Smartphones
Communication access becomes associated with a carried identity and device rather than a fixed desk, household line or computer terminal. Cameras, microphones and sensors make people continuous potential producers of photographs, video, audio, location traces.
Open topic →Follow the history from beginning to present
Conversation and dialogue
Conversation is not simply two people taking turns to transmit finished messages.
Time-sharing
Time-sharing turns one scarce computer into an interactive service for many users.
Bulletin-board systems, Usenet and Internet chat
Bulletin-board systems, Usenet and Internet chat groups three related but distinct pre-Web community forms.
Instant Messaging and Chat Applications
Instant messaging and chat applications are not one protocol or one degree of “instantness.” They are a family of services that coordinate accounts, contacts, presence, addressed messages, group spaces, delivery state.
Smartphones
Smartphones combine a portable general-purpose computer, mobile telephone, network terminal, camera, microphone, display, positioning system, sensor array, local store and application platform in one personally carried.