Greetings Economists, Charles Brown posed an indirect question about email?
US foreign investment / tactics in Venezuela by Charles Brown 18 April 2002 20:17 UTC [PEN-L:25124] Charles "Maybe there is a challenge as to whether it (Social Revolution - Doyle) will be on email." Doyle I want to look at this point. The basic idea contained in press reports about Venezuela that TV stations broadcast a distorted view of Chavez, and that the people using cell phones came together into a mass to successfully reverse the coup. In other words the suggestion is that telephone communications were able to over come the bias of motion picture media in organizing a national response to the anti Chavez coup attempt. Can we really say anything about that contention in the press that telephones decided the process over TV? In particular addressing Charles query, how might email contribute to such a mass response in some region of the world. I would suggest these elements, first, understand what might be different between telephone and television communications, two briefly look at collaboration techniques with email or other related internet technologies, three look at the statistics that underlie information production, four points at what would be useful to the working class movement. One Motion pictures, television viewing are passive experiences. A telephone call is active in the sense we talk to each other (hopefully). Telephone conversation are interactive. Therefore the product of calls is going to contain information shaped by different uses of the information, passive, and active and have different forms of the data. An individual conversing (interacting with) can listen to someone else and integrate those thoughts into their mind, and respond to those thoughts. A television viewer cannot easily (especially the poor masses) take movies and exchange them with the television audience to whom they might want to speak. Therefore we can suggest that the forms of labor produced by television and telephones bring into being different end products. With telephone conversations the end product on both sides is an interactive unit of communication. With Television the product lacks an interactive component coming from the viewer. In the case of Venezuela, the broadcast clearly were against Chavez. The viewer might reasonably presume that since they can't talk back to the TV broadcaster and audience that their thoughts would have little affect upon the social system in Venezuela. The mass TV audience though lacking reports on television from the other side supporting Chavez, also did not change poor people's minds, and through talking to each other their sense of betrayal quickly coalesced into action together on the streets. Two We could use this list as an example of how collaboration works with email. People see a pool of emails popping up during a calendar day. Various people write in to each other about their thoughts. The emails get stored in an archive. We can use the typical email thought in an historical sense or referring to previously published thoughts. We can access this as often as making a phone call. Collaboration in business settings also includes working on a document together, which we don't see on this list for the most part though there are forms of using each others work through linking and quoting. Collaboration in business requires versioning information to avoid the confusion various similar documents might present. Collaboration entails the ability in real time to work on the same document together. The use of workflow for review and permissions around common goals are requirements for teams working on common projects. Templates to enforce standard practices are often used in large Enterprises. For example a template might use fields that have to be filled out with metadata. Then the documents once archived can be used quickly and efficiently. Three Per hour television broadcasts produce 2.25 Giga Bytes of data. In the U.S. television broadcast equals about 4470 terabytes per year in 1999. US voice telephone traffic per month is 48,000 terabytes per month in 1999. Voice traffic is much higher than television data traffic! One wonders if the disparity in the U.S. is related to the one way nature of television. Motion pictures accounted for $20.8 billion of the gross domesticate product for 1993 which had 6642.3 billion total GDP. Telephone and Telegraph produced $139 billion GDP in 1993. Radio and TV combined were $39.6 billion GDP in 1993. Radio, Television, and movies combined were about half the product of voice telephone! And in the last decade talk radio was extremely fast growing. That being a hybrid of interactive and passive communications. While the volume of interactive data traffic is much higher than passively received movie, television, and radio traffic, we can't say that interactivity is the deciding factor for the higher volume associated with one kind of data over the other. But there is a stark contrast between the values of one type over the other. One feature of Broadcast television is the communal universal. We all share the same news, the same famous personalities, etc. This sharing process is quite different from the specificity of conversations on the phone. Four The above information is suggestive of a larger general value of interactive information over passive information. Standard software available for business offers a variety of modes of collaboration. Since it was talk that made the difference in Venezuela, we might look a bit deeper into the 'interactivity' of talk versus passive data. A phone conversation with a friend aroused about the injustice to Chavez, is more moving than words written upon paper. This is because the voice carries emotional content as well as verbal content. Similarly the face carries expression of feeling better than words, so email that carries pictures of people's faces would convey the emotional charge of events better than words alone. People tend to organize their social life around family, friends, and acquaintances. Email because of search engines allows one to organize communications more broadly than physical presence. Telephones also allow one to keep in touch at a distance, but lack the search and archive advantages of email. We issue speech in the real world in real time. Writings on paper are detached from the moment in the world so we don't know what is being lost when writing is detached from the world. Therefore we need to be able to use email in the moment where we are located taking advantage of embodiment. Embodiment refers to the technical issue of using information in the world directly rather than at a distance. When one decides to take action in the world, we use our bodies, we therefore want email to reflect as much of the embodiment of a human being as possible to convey the reality of events. Let's take the concept of Augmented Reality currently being used by the U.S. military in operations in Afghanistan. The soldier wears a headset that displays information as they move through the landscape. Words and images are displayed upon the landscape as needed and embedded in global position mapping. Summarizing, interactivity in telephone conversation clearly seems to show some value over and above broadcast television. Collaboration techniques in current software content management tools for business facilitate common means of working together across distances. These tools suggest powerful new ways to organize communications amongst workers based upon the use of embodiment in real events. These tools used in the factual world would increase by far the ability to convey the reality of great social moments for millions of people at once. These tools lend themselves to the social cohesion necessary for building socialist movements by increasing solidarity related to embodiment and interactivity. Thanks, Doyle Saylor
