Reno Provine
http://www.ganconference.com

I think the average SL’er will find that the voice feature will confuse things more than it will benefit them. And they will return to text chat quite fast, as chatters did on Yahoo.

If LL are in any way similar to Yahoo in the way they “upgrade” the interaction features, the next thing will be webcams on Second Life. I see it coming and trust me, that will change the face of everything. Because by then you will be pestered by other SL users over and over again with “Can I see your cam?”. This fundementally undermined the quality of chat on yahoo and will do the same for SL.

The horror.. the horror…

But if they can TELL me what they are doing, their hands are free to continue working and I am not interrupting them with my curiosity. Furthermore, won’t the more effective combination of using the build tools and explaining their functionality while doing so ( as opposed to doing, stopping to explain, doing…) help create better ‘universities’ than currently exist?

Ashcroft, as I hope you understand, I’m on “your side” in the sense that your arguments are the ones that are rational, logical, and correct. Nevertheless, the European Union, Japan or Korea are plagued with more mobile phones than inhabitants — and I’m pretty sure that while the mobile operators’ profits come from SMS, the use given to all those phones is still for voice calls. This is a mentality very hard to change — after all, after 130 years using telephones, we were all “brainwashed” that the best way to communicate is to do it face-to-face, and the second best one is by using a voice call. It’ll be hard to prove, through rational arguments, that this is, in fact, simply not true. The ones making the decisions about voice will not listen (pun intended) by rational and logical argumentation. You don’t find people in decision areas that will take those arguments and go “aaah, yes, you’re so right, let’s get rid of phones”. Instead, the first thing a company does is to get a phone number; only afterwards they might get an email address, just because it is fashionable to do so.

At my home, I have a telephone just because recently I got an ADSL line (I used a cable connection before). Nobody knows the phone number except my parents; I have no use for the phone, and can’t even remember the phone number. But then again, I’m an odd one, and don’t register on the statistics Imagine my difficulty of opening a bank account a few years ago without giving a phone number. Managers were outraged and shocked; I sometimes gave my parent’s phone number instead just to be able to open the account…

No, the notion that “voice is supreme” is too ingrained into our society, and “mass voice communications” is still in the minds of people as being an achievement of the 20th century. People would be surprised to find out that “voice traffic” over the world-wide networks these days pales in comparison to data communications in the 21st century. Of course, much of that traffic is already VoIP…

The sort of people in my experience who insist on using voice, and only voice, in a business context are:

- Human Resources, who want to be able to judge your mood, and also don’t want to make any recordable promises (sorry, I have a bad opinion of HR based on past experience);
- Sales people, who want to be able to bully you verbally into an immediate decision rather than you being able to review their offers at your leisure;
- Incompetent middle-managers, who don’t actually have an opinion or anything to say and can’t understand what it is that other people are trying to tell them, so need to have lengthy voice conversations to (a) “prove” that they’re involved and (b) have people pander to their stupidity and explain, at length, over and over again, what is going on.

I’ve talked about this outside of any sort of internet context with a lot of people and I find that those who don’t fall into those categories are quite aware of the issues of voice (and face-to-face meetings) across all demographics. The admin staff say “don’t waste my time in meetings, send me an email with what you want done, I’m busy”. The members of the board say “don’t waste my time with phone calls, summarise the issue into proper proposals and reports, I’m busy”. In my earlier days I was explicitly advised by the good managers that I had to always request a follow-up email after every conversation and, more importantly, not do anything until this was received. It’s a common perception. People realise when voice is appropriate over text, for discussion and “brainstorming” usually, but they’re not wedded to it at all, and for some things they prefer to use text.

In fact, even when voice would be more efficient as a mechanism, a lot of people would prefer just to receive emails, because voice chat dominates your entire sensorium as you say, and you can’t be talking to more than one person at a time. Getting a phone call while talking to someone else is the obvious example, but it’s also difficult to reply to one’s emails while on the phone or speaking face-to-face – I simply can’t do it to my usual standard, and other people agree.

The problem is that so many companies have their internal process plan dominated by the third type of person that I mention that it’s very hard to make progress. But my point is that for everyone else, as far as I can see, it’s obvious that sometimes voice is convenient, and sometimes it isn’t. You say that “companies get scared” – it’s the people who are wedded to voice who get scared, who unfortunately are often the decision-makers when it comes to protocol, the majority of employees aren’t bothered.