dessalles

Been thinking about different forms of digital communication and why they exist. I’m seeing an increasing need, particularly in the design of online communities and social networks, to formalize the conditions under which the needs of a conversation no longer align with the affordances of a particular communications channel – forcing a change in medium. At what point does a Facebook Wall conversation migrate to email? What influences a text message conversation to become a phone call?

Those who’ve held onto their grade school science will remember, in chemistry, a phase transition is the process by which a substance passes from one state of matter to another due to relatively small temperature and pressure changes. I’d like to see a similar mapping between a conversation’s conditions/needs and it’s corresponding medium or “phase”. And some nomenclature would be nice. What would you call the transition from text-messaging to a phone call? What’s the communications equivalent of condensation?

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