Redial Midterm Proposal

Rhetoricall, Lots and Lots of Background 

What can I do with voice interaction? It took me a while to couple this question with the Advance Dialog Project that I am working on, but in hindsight it is a natural fit. The voice context is rich enough to spawn an independent project, in fact. 

Am I being vague?

Let’s back up. Advance Dialog is /may be/ my thesis project here at ITP. It currently consists of a set of assumptions about the power of design to create environments conducive to “optimal” dialectical, rational discourse. English to english translation? I want to build a kick-ass political discussion website. I’m tired of the low-signal, crap infested gibberish that passes for political discourse, both at the “official” realm of talking heads & politicians, as well as the message board/newsgroup world of online discussion. 

Yes, there are some exceptions to this. Usually these are invite-only gated communities, or listserves, or some other platform where the architecture of the space itself contributes to the signal by creating a barrier to entry and therefore a “garden”. Slashdot, in my opinion, has created one of the best moderation systems I have seen yet for a “public” environment.

At any rate, back to Redial and Asterisk. I sat in class for the first few weeks not really sure how I could take advantage of this incredibly powerful toolset.  For one thing, the cellphone is a giant device. I mean that in the sense that there are hundreds of connotations, uses, contexts, applications and implications for these increasingly smaller and more capable contraptions.  It is a phone, but can also be a still camera, a video camera, a voice recorder; it can handle text and texting, it can be a calendar, a contact manager, a safety device, a social artifact, an excuse, a liability, it is anonymous in the sense that it can connect you to anyone or anything with a phone number, yet it is also incredibly intimate – by using the communication, you are in effect allowing someone to whisper into your ear. It’s so mundane on the one hand — think of talking to a customer service rep about your bank account — but it is also incredibly direct -a disturbance of the eardrum, a membrane located inside your head. 

For me, the most salient quality of the cellphone is the richness of signal conveyed by the human voice. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they speak that is absent in the written word. I could be screaming this sentence, or whispering it, and NO MATTER HOW HARD I TRY {{{…there is no real way to convey in digital text…}}} this range of emotion and impact that is native to the human voice. 

So let’s bring this back to the idea about political discourse. Back in the days of Socrates, arguably the zenith of public discussion, people would gather on the streets and pursue philosophical questions as a group. It was personal, face to face, and, judging by the documentation provided by Plato, deep and rich political inquiry. What can we learn from these epic political discussions that could be relevant to designing the optimal discussion website today?

When you make the transition from the real world to the virtual you lose the personal (familiar) aspect (at least until a new setting & participants become familiar), the face to face aspect of visual cues, body language, and eye contact also disappear (and cannot be said to be recaptured by videochatting in any meaningful way, IMHO), but the voice component – perhaps the singularly most rich, happens to be also well suited to make the transition.

Political Argumentation has a very important voice component. Much is lost in the conversion to text (the current dominant mode of political discussion online), and I think there is a direct correlation to the loss of signal in political arguments online (chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, etc) due to the fact that we can’t HEAR each other’s voice while advocating a given position. If sincerity is the first benchmark towards people wanting to engage one another in earnest discussion, then the voice aspect is a sure way to get this crucial degree of signal.

What I have spent the last thousand or so words saying is that for an online interaction designer who is interested in augmenting things like trust, robustness of identity, and channels for meaningful social interaction, the human voice is an incredibly rich source of inspiration and will serve as my focus for a political discussion website that aims to encourage users to speak their beliefs using their own voice.  

While this web-based voice-capable site would have a significant textual and graphic component (i.e. conversation mapping/conversation visualization research), the audio interface should be robust enough to be able to stand on its own strength. In other words, the audio content should be accessible from a phone menutree without having to resort to a website with an associated map. Why? Because I like the idea that the discussion site can be “portable”, i.e. fully accessible from a cellphone.

Rhetoricall, an Introduction

To this end, I will design the phone menu tree independently of the web component. The basic functions will be to post audio to a given category, and to access audio from given categories. Bonus functionality would be for users to be able to pick up where they left off (assuming the system can store the cellphone which would entail a database…), be able to pause, fast forward and rewind a given audio file, and to receive a copy of their submitted audio by voicemail.

I just had the idea for a website name – www.rhetoricall.com. That is already registered, so I grabbed rhetoricall.net. The beginnings?