From Email Culture To Stream Culture: Out Of The Inbox

In recent weeks, my work on the Open Enterprise 2009 study has led to many conversations where practitioners and other researchers have mentioned the movement away from email culture to more open models of interaction.

Here’s one way to characterize that movement, which at the highest level is from closed to open forms of communication, or as I characterized it in a presentation I am giving tomorrow in Hamburg at Next09, the movement from Hiding to Sharing.

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Hiding To Sharing: Tempo, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

First, let’s look at the transition from asynchronous to synchronous communication, as the Web sped up to the point where it was possible. Email is very much a store-and-forward, batch mode sort of beast, while IM and Microblogging (or Streaming) ar synchronous at the most basic level.

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Hiding To Sharing: Access, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Second, I have borrowed the secret, private, public concept from Gabriel García Márquez (“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”) to differentiate the levels of access we provide to those we interact with in these different media.

Email is principally secret: you have to go to great and explicit lengths to break out of the default, closed, 1:1 communication channel in email. (I particularly love the poetic and ultra-secretive ‘blind cc’, which feels like witetapping.)

IM is principally private — providing more access to others, like presence info — but the controls are oriented toward restriction of access.

Microblogging (like Twitter) is based on a public model. Unless explicitly access is restricted, or communication placed in direct messages, microblogging follows an open follow model, where anyone can elect to see what I am posting.

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Hiding To Sharing: Comntext, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Third, the context where the user ‘lives in’ while using the communication media changes.

Using email, I feel like I am trapped in the inbox, reading and writing email. It does not feel like you are conversing, but reading and writing.

IM feels like I am in a chat room, with other users around, posting presence information, and occasionally starting or continuing conversations with one or more others.

When microblogging, I experience a stream of updates from all those that I follow, as well as public and private messages directed to me from others, some who may be total strangers. This is the largest shift of all involved, and as a result, microblogging — of the three — is the only medium that is social and open, based on the principles of web sharing.

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I gleaned some of this from my discussions from others in recent weeks, but I think this is the first time I have seen this distinction characterized this way, using these three dimensions.