Oh, absolutely. It takes a little more effort, but it can be done, and if you're interested in a conversation, putting in a little more effort to hear the whispers people are passing to each other isn't so bad. Which has interesting implications for eavesdroppers, and makes me think about the intended audience for whisperspace. Whispers are quiet for a reason: you're minimizing who "overhears" you, and you're aiming them at people who are near by and actively listening, but that doesn't mean that someone who is listening very hard might not hear... which might be neutral, bad, or good for the speaker, depending. Note that almost all of these typographical quirks that set off whisperspace make the text slightly harder to read and require a little bit of extra effort, like quietly focusing on and listening to someone who is literally whispering. (The only exception is all-lowercase communication, which is something I primarily see on MeFi and I think denotes sarcasm or silliness or just extreme informality as much as anything else.)
I've been thinking about whisperspace and other very quiet signals in my capacity as a biologist working in animal communication today, as I try and organize my notes to tackle a study of social context and the quiet chirps and squeaks and whistles that my mice make. (More from me on sensory modalities here.) The Internet is different from other modalities of communication, though, in that interested people can actually upregulate their receptive power--that is, if you're interested in what people are saying to one another in the tags, you can use XKit or another browser to help minimize the effort it takes you to pick up those communications, or you can go to the trouble of increasing the font size, or or or. Which the intended recipients of the conversation can also do, but which also requires a little bit of extra effort. It's something I can't really work out existing in other modalities and forms of communication.
(Except maybe smell, I guess, where you could upregulate your receptor densities for a particular compound to perceive it at lower densities. Smell is also probably the least chronologically sensitive sensory modality I can think of, come to that, but it's also the hardest for me to wrap my head around. Probably why it's terminally understudied, I guess.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-01-24 03:16 pm (UTC)I've been thinking about whisperspace and other very quiet signals in my capacity as a biologist working in animal communication today, as I try and organize my notes to tackle a study of social context and the quiet chirps and squeaks and whistles that my mice make. (More from me on sensory modalities here.) The Internet is different from other modalities of communication, though, in that interested people can actually upregulate their receptive power--that is, if you're interested in what people are saying to one another in the tags, you can use XKit or another browser to help minimize the effort it takes you to pick up those communications, or you can go to the trouble of increasing the font size, or or or. Which the intended recipients of the conversation can also do, but which also requires a little bit of extra effort. It's something I can't really work out existing in other modalities and forms of communication.
(Except maybe smell, I guess, where you could upregulate your receptor densities for a particular compound to perceive it at lower densities. Smell is also probably the least chronologically sensitive sensory modality I can think of, come to that, but it's also the hardest for me to wrap my head around. Probably why it's terminally understudied, I guess.)