Introduction
My wife Cheryl and I were sitting in our living room talking about our family’s blog which we made expressly to keep in contact with our friends and family who are spread out all over the globe.
To varying degrees people are more or less reading it. Mostly less.
It could be that we’re just boring and that our friends and family don’t really care about our lives, but we noticed an interesting pattern.
People will call sometimes to find out what we’re doing and the conversations can go on for quite a while. In fact, recently a friend of Cheryl’s called to find out how she was. She’d just had surgery, but her friend didn’t have a clue about it even though we posted the news prominently on the blog. So our first question was, "didn’t you see it on the blog?" And he said "I don’t have time to check the blog."
Yet that same person is willing to talk to us on the phone for way longer than it would take to just scan the blog to see what’s going on.
My wife and I couldn’t understand why someone who didn’t have 5 minutes out of their day to just look at a web site had an hour or two to talk to us over the phone. We didn’t have that kind of time and we believed that we were being efficient by creating a feed of information that people could come to on their own terms. Some were doing exactly that. Others weren’t.
So we wondered if people tended to prioritize their personal styles of communication over what might seem to be logical or efficient and why. What affect does the channel itself have on the communicator and how does his or her preference of channel impact the message.
From our conversations came this model for how these communications may work.
I want to share with you the details of this model of communication which I believe might be useful in looking at social networking, blogs, texting, instant messaging and many forms of communication that we use to get through our day to day lives in the Internet age.
I am going to do this as a series. Otherwise you’d have to wait quite a while before you get any of it at all.
Next we’ll take a look at the problem in a more down to earth way.
