Operation Blackout

Patrick Rogers

Going an entire day without communications like the Internet, telephone, and television was much harder than I expected.  Not really because 18 hours of no internet is a bad thing, just a little out of the ordinary for most college students. The first few hours were relatively easy despite the fact I denied to myself my iPhone didn’t count for about 15 minutes.  During this break from the habit of the internet I took time to figure out how/if these inventions changed the way I communicate offline.  What I found is that we do so in two main ways and that's good.

I started with the first internety thing I had.  AIM. Ever since the early days of AOL's AIM people have valued the anonymity in communication.  It was fun to have the messaging available on most phones before the internet was readily available for cellular devices.  AOL allowed you to see your friends and chat with them in a list format that let you see the conversation progress.  Based on this rapidly updating list, an individual is more likely to react with the device as the spoken word instead of a digital letter (often referred to as a message or Email), excuse me... email.  This common mistype is due to a societies adoption of certain methods of communication. 

We all email.  We all chat. But these two formats seem to be much more different than one might imagine.

Think about how you share a link with one of your friends, you probably email it (if your even still that old school).  Do you write anything longer than three sentences?  Probably not.  Usually along the lines of "here" or "funny hipster pictures I told you about."  That's because you treat the email as a letter.  A format more often preserved for more formal correspondence. It's much more likely that you share your funny things on the chat format.  Users who use chat functions are more often than not typing short messages rather than lengthy formal things.  Why formal?  Most likely due to that unsaid feeling that you get with the email format that your message is being saved or is considered to "officially" come from you. 

Now share that same content with that friend over a chat-format form of correspondence.  You messages are conversational and might even mimic the basic rules of face-to-face conversation.   Examples like: "Hey what’s up?, Hi!, or even the user breaking abruptly into a conversations might be considered normal.  Also, much more text will be made in this format by adding all the niceties of a local version of discussion.  We'll call this "Personal Correspondence" with the ambiguities and misunderstandings of conversation a lot more perspective is given.

This distinction in methods of communication is made offline as well.  Chat would seem to gravitate more towards spoken word and email to written.  It was then that I realized something interesting.  The main difference is not so much in the method of the communication but rather its storage.  Conversations are quickly blurred and forgotten and written notes can get lost or destroyed.  These organic ways of communicating are also much more forgiving then their “social” counterparts. 

After the time was up I jumped online and began reading about chat and email storage histories and found some alarming information.  Now imagine that link your sharing is confidential (or a joke in really bad taste your sending to a friend from college.)  In an email format, there would be a send and receive dynamic that limits the amount of discussion simply by, at the very least, being an inconvenience.  Simply put, a conversational format of communication exposes significant security risk to most daily users of the internet. 

If you don’t appreciate people on the street listening to every conversation you have perhaps its time we looked at chats the same.  Remember AOL? It deleted your messages when you logged off.  Use Facebook or Google Chat?  Facebook has disabled the removal of chat history when it combined it with messages a few months ago.  Gtalk by default saves all chats but has the option to be deleted from your inbox.  This may not effect most user of this class in the short term, but as a new generation grows up with the tools on the internet a ticker-tape of photos, emails, and conversations will be stored from virtually every aspect of their interests.  That’s something to think about.  I think I will be repeating this assignment.