Google Wave is Awesome

I’m a New Media Guy. I’m easily excited by cool innovations in human communication. Blog–Journal, Face–Tube, Twit–Space, I love ‘em — and seeing new stuff emerging day and night keeps my hipster soul as happy as a pig in poo.

Some say people are getting dumber; I say that communication is becoming more egalitarian, that the dumb are simply more visible to each other and to us (who are not dumb, naturally). There’s a justifiable horror in response to l33t-​​speak, txt lnguaj, personal profile pages that are an abomination to the eyes and ears and sanity, but it’s not such a big deal. People are communicating more and more, filling every moment of their day with interaction with other people and even though a tweet is no substitute for Face Time, all of them are to be celebrated. Nobody ever really got dumber from talking to somebody else, so let’s cheer for the adorable idiots who flood the ‘net with OMGs because they’re learning and becoming more awesome, bit by bit and byte bi byte.

Of course, at the same time there’s also a sieving process going on that causes us to expose ourselves less and less to information or forms of dialogue that require more than a minute to consume. This is legitimately worrisome, but, again, it’s not the end of the world since the value of byte-​​sized data and dialogue is evidently increasing. Wikipedia articles are brisk and informative, and the risk of vandalism or misinformation is no greater than the risk that a printed encyclopaedia article is, by the time you read it, laughably out of date. Twitter is largely meaningless chaff with little substance, but browsing the last hour of tweets is a lot like nipping in to the town pub to get the Cliff notes on what your cyber-​​locals are up to and catch up on the talk of the day.

The twentieth century saw the emergence of communication technologies that were either true paradigm shifts or technology-​​enhanced versions of existing, proven forms of communication. The radio and telephone broke new ground in human consciousness by allowing direct, synchronous conversation unbound by space, but he telegraph was merely a much faster form of postal mail, the car– and cellphone a more convenient form of telephony. And even then, these were versions of modes of dialogue that had been in operation for centuries: the spoken conversation and the written letter.

In the twenty-​​first we’re seeing the emergence of more radical media. Blogs represented an egalitarian form of one-​​to-​​many broadcasting previously reserved for newsprint and magazines, IM allows us to hold live, synchronous conversations with many different people at once.

But the most interesting, popular and successful communication media have been those that blend the different models: synchronous and asynchronous, one-​​on-​​one and one-​​to-​​many, private and public. You can be notified of and reply to an e-​​mail or text message instantly, holding a live back-​​and-​​forth, or you can get back to it at your leisure without offending the sender. You can write a blog post and ‘lock’ it so that only your select friends can see it.

As we integrate more modes of thought and conversation into our lives it becomes more and more important to us to be able to smoothly transition from one to another at will. This usually means switching the conversation to another medium — checking to see whether your friend is on IM after you get an e-​​mail you want to take action on immediately — but that’s awkward for many reasons.

For one, you have to know many contact points for each of your friends. What’s your Facebook? And your e-​​mail? And which IM do you use? Also, what’s your birthday?

For another, this leaves the history of your conversation spread out across multiple platforms. You asked your friend for his address, but you can’t find it any more. Did he send a message on Facebook? Is it in your e-​​mail archive? How about your chat history?

So, what does Google Wave have to offer that makes me giddy? Coming right up…