Just One Question for Gregory Alkaitis-Carafelli
Gregory Alkaitis-Carafelli is formerly of Planet Gregory, and currently of so.anyway.org, home of his adventures in new media. Along with Alexis Massie, Gregory re-introduced voice into the genre of personal narrative with Regarding.com, a site whose primary interface is RealAudio.
MS: What’s voice got on ASCII?
GAC: It’s natural. It’s as simple as that - people have more practice being expressive in voice. With text you have basically only word choice to work with in getting your message across. If I’m speaking to you, I can use vocal intonation, tempo and volume to communicate fully my meaning. The spoken word is richer also for the subtle non-verbal gestures like the sharp intake of breath or the murmur that have no substitute in text, but can totally change the emphasis of ideas, or the connotation of words.
Voice has the added advantage of being the original push technology -once you turn on the radio a steady stream of content is delivered while you drive, shower, check your e-mail: which is still one up on the tired text based push schemes like Pointcast or Netcaster. Voice and text both have their moments, but for a natural, rich, dynamic presentation it’s voice that can deliver where ASCII falls short.