(no subject)

[andrewducker]

Heron described my previous post as being

Rather like a long example and somewhat odd example of that old surrealist game where each person writes a paragraph after only seeing one line of the previous person's paragraph

My first thought was that a lot of internet conversations are like that. Email's particularly bad, because you frequently don't have any memory of the long history of the conversation you're engaged in, just the text in front of you. This can lead to serious conversation drift, as each response takes something in the previous mail and runs with it, paying little heed to the direction the conversation had been going in so far.

And then I realised that this wasn't purely a net-based phenomenon. I've been in several conversations where someone responded to some word or phrase and then based their response entirely on that. I've done it myself, picking holes in the grammar or metaphor rather than in what they meant, purely because it was what stood out from the conversation. I think that people's internal comprehension centres find it easier to snag a keyword or keyphrase out of the air and use it as the basis of their conversation than to understand and analyse the meaning of the whole conversation, produce a coherent response and then articulate it.

And that's why you get conversations like this:

Me: "and the other annoying thing he does is go on about the weather!"
Them: "The weather! Gaah, have you noticed how cold it is today. I wish I lived somewhere warm like California."
Me: "I spent 2 weeks in California once, travelling from San Francisco to Los Angeles, then on to Dallas to visit a friend."
Them: "Dallas, now there was a show. I remember those terrible haircuts, and JR being shot."
Me: "I'll tell you who I'd like to have shot, Bob in accounts."
Them: "Don't talk to me about accounts, why just last week....."

Each sentence doesn't require the participants to recognise more than 2 words in the previous one to reply to it and it almost sounds like they're listening to each other. But not quite.

Comments

[aberbotimue.livejournal.com]

should you realy be posting your desires to have Bob in accounts topped??

If he gets killed now, you know who is the first suspect..

I feel you are right, and yes we do pick on some words and followe that tangent, but is that following our own desires of conversation, rather than not taking in the whole sentance? are you saying that we maybe don't take in the whole sentance?

as for your writing of a review, does that not mean it was badly writen, as an indevidual review, or was it supposed to be a criteek of the first review? and am i actually forming true sentances here. speaking of sentances, the shoe bommer got sent down for quite a while.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Personally, the problem I always have is that the other party says something, which may have several differnt points of interest or note, but being as talking is a serial business, I can only take on ONE of them. It's just too too frustrating. I often end up trying to keep a note of as many tangents as possible so we can work our way back ("closing all the brackets" as either I or Martin Jones started calling it).

Beware - utter one simple sentence in my hearing and you may end up in a conversation that goes on until

a) I fall asleep (quite likely - I can't stay up late)
b) you fall asleep (whether through boredom or exhaustion)
c) we get way too outrageously drunk to even speak
d) one of us really really wants to hit the other
e) the crazy experiment using common kitchen items that one of us dreams up to prove some esoteric point goes horribly and terminally wrong.

It's what makes life fun :-) I'm so glad that my husband agrees.

[andrewducker]

but being as talking is a serial business, I can only take on ONE of them.

One of the massive advantages of email/written conversation.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

How so? You still have to do one point after another. Ok it's slower so you have more chance to put stuff down and it's turn by turn and your turn lasts as long as you like so you can rattle on.

Now this kind of format where you can do every tangent as a hyperlink - that might work. You still have to write and read it serially though, which can still lead to missed bits.

I feel like I want to follow all the tangents simultaneously, which isn't really plausible.

[andrewducker]

How so?

Because I can respond to all of the tangents in one big wodge, rather than losing track of them.

You still have to do one point after another.
But in normal conversation I forget the old ones.

Ok it's slower so you have more chance to put stuff down and it's turn by turn and your turn lasts as long as you like so you can rattle on.
Like this?

Now this kind of format where you can do every tangent as a hyperlink - that might work. You still have to write and read it serially though, which can still lead to missed bits.
You want a threaded newsreader. That keeps track of what you've read and what you haven't and keeps replies in track under whatever they're a reply to.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

I think you perhaps misunderstand my problem (because I haven't expressed it very well). My main problem is not remembering where what has been said, or what I want to say - it's in getting out all of what I want to say at anything close to the rate at which I'm thinking it and having it comprehended and absorbed by the other conversational participants.

Waiting for other people to finish a diversionary branch, or expressing one point takes the other points further from immediate relevance. There comes a stage when the topic has drifted a wee bit and I get confused looks when I backtrack. Most people just seem to want to go on down one branch until well, closing time, or dinner is ready or whatever. Of course I do lose the thread sometimes, but I seem to cause other people to do it more often.

I don't want to totally hijack the conversation (although I do tend to come close), because I am interested in the other person's thoughts - they are a necessary part of the process of thinking.

I'm afraid I mentally went off on a diversion in my head just there. Something about the purpose of thought (for me) and fractals and one-ness with the universe... I'd be here all day....

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Waiting for other people to finish a diversionary branch, or expressing one point

I should have said "Waiting for other people to finish a diversionary branch, or expressing one point (of the many) myself"

[andrewducker]

as for your writing of a review, does that not mean it was badly writen, as an indevidual review, or was it supposed to be a criteek of the first review?

The person wrote a very negative review of the film, I felt compelled to write a positive one in defence...

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

Here's a thought, and sonce you're a programmer, you might even know a way to do it without too much bother: how about a random conversation generator? It has a database of sentences (or perhaps it generates random sentences from its database of vocabulary and grammar), it generates a sentence or two, and then it picks up on one word or keyphrase and generates a new sentence based on that. It would be interesting to see what sorts of things it did, and whether it would generate conversations we semantics-havers would be able to follow.

[andrewducker]

I don't know if you've read Neil Gaiman's Signal to Noise, but the text pieces in there were produced using Babble, a text processor which does something like that. I keep meaning to write a windows version of it, because it's not that complicated to get something basic up and running.

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

Ooooo. Tell me more of this 'babble'!

[andrewducker]

Well, if you have anything which can run DOS handy, you can see it for yourself here:
http://www.notzen.com/andrew/BAB200.ZIP

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.
No DOS.
No Windows, neither.
Mmmmmmrr...

[andrewducker]

Sigh, you OS wierdo.

Basically, it seems to work by simply parsing the text and building up probability tables of how often a word is followed by another word. It then picks a random sentence start and works its way through the sentence, adding each new word probabilistically.

It has an 'advanced' mode, which (I think) does the same with word pairs (how often a word pair is followed by another word pair).

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

Does it not get a bit repetitive?

[andrewducker]

Not if you feed in a few thousand words. Or all of Hamlet.

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

It sounds really cool. I'd love to see it in action.