July 24, 2006
Creating A Real Global Village
eWeek's Paula Musich recently wrote about TalkShoe, an American company that's created a web service that enables VoIP conferences involving thousands of participants.
While in theory that sounds like a great idea, and the technological accomplishment is to be applauded, I'm not so sure I'd want to be one of those participants, unless there were some "rules of VoIP conference order" established.
Roberts Rules of Order and Parliamentery Procedure were established for in-person meetings, to make sure that participants wouldn't all try to speak at once, an activity that sometimes causes VoIP calls to cut out. But even armchair anthropologists should have noticed that in the past 12 years in particular, our attention spans have shortened. Many people can't carry on a polite conversation with just one other person.
Even someone like myself, who was once long ago a diehard "manners" person, can't have a text IM conversation without interrupting the other person, let alone an in-person or VoIP/ PSTN conversation.
Some people blame the Internet for this reduced attention span; others blame video games. Regardless, given poor conversational abilities and the still-developing call quality of VoIP, try imagining a thousand-person VoIP conference. I shudder to think.
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