Strange experience last Friday: I was explaining Skype to colleagues in Admissions who want to set up some kind of chat capability in their recruiting efforts, and I stopped making sense when I began to use the word “call.” I made sense to me, but I could see that I had lost the other folks in the conversation.
Finding that I’ve stopped making sense is not so strange, of course. What’s strange is that common verbs don’t usually pose a problem in my conversations. In this case, though, I discovered that “call” now means something different to me than it did even a year ago. When I say “call,” I mean “initiate electronic contact via a medium that emphasizes voice but includes other modes as well.” The modes have begun to blur for me, and I hadn’t even recognized that they had. I do say “text” as a verb when I mean “send an SMS message over my cell phone,” and I can distinguish between chat and VoIP and video and so forth, but the catch is that when I’m in one of those convergent environments, such as a cell phone that does SMS or a Skype that does voice and chat and video, I use the word “call” in ways that are not entirely intelligible to folks who are not used to that environment.
Memo to self: remember non-convergence is still the rule. Slow down. Sometimes.
Although I think Skype is closer to a phone call than an IM exchange.
Or is it? (second thoughts, very dangerous) Certainly, the non-converged use phones more than chat.
Seemingly simple stuff can trip you up…
I should have talked more about this in the post. Skype mixes chat, voice, and video in ways that are particularly interesting. I can invite you to a chat over Skype, but the metaphor within which Skype operates is that of the telephone, so inviting someone to chat begins to feel, in my metaphor-space, like “calling” them. So in the conversation I kept talking about “calling” someone when what I meant was “invite them to a chat,” or perhaps “open a chat channel while we’re talking,” or whatever. Then I reflected that “calling” someone on the telephone is itself metaphorical. We just don’t recognize it as such anymore.