Five Levels of Social Conversation
Friend, deep thinker, and prolific email friend, Bill Cammack and I were talking about how people use things like Seesmic and other media to make conversations. I told him my theory that I like to believe there are five general categories of conversation out there. Bill asked me if I’d blogged about it, so here it is.
Five Levels of Social Conversation
I believe there are roughly five levels at which we communicate on tools like Seesmic or Utterz or Twitter (to a lesser extent):
- My Dog Has Fleas - baseline social conversation. No different than what would be said in line at a grocery store, and not usually that interesting.
- Let’s Talk About X - conversation, but hit or miss on real insight.
- Hacks and Energy - lots of good stuff, still a little hit or miss, but with more engaged/engaging types. (Not sure why I call it hacks, but I mean when you suddenly get into a bit of fast energy flow).
- Production - people who understand the medium and are “making” something, but who aren’t into conversation, per se. (like Internet TV shows.)
- Serious and Deep - rarest of the rare.
Most of my conversations probably fall into 2 and 3. Sometimes I produce something, too, but not so often. Am I serious and deep on the web? Not usually in video.
What do you think? Am I missing anything? Is this silly?
Thanks for the email, Bill. I’ll reply on that a little later.
Photo credit, Bill Cammack.
