Hello all, This is my first foray into publicly attempting to ask this question, so please bear with my wandering hither and yon. I would like to provide new and/or differing communication mechanisms through the Internet, though I realize that I should really know how and why and by whom current mechanisms are being utilized in order to have a chance at coming up with more useful tools. However simply comparing and contrasting existing modalities seems like a herculean effort. Do such comparisons exist? The few things Google has lead me to are pretty limited in scope either in modalities covered, aspects being compared, or the details of comparing them. I would like comparisons including but not limited to CMC. Preferably it would compare communication mediums or processes including face-to-face, postal mail, phone, cell, texting, web cams, MUDs/MOOs/MMOGs, bulletin boards (physical and digital), ad-hoc meetings, conferences, and possibly anything else from hieroglyphs, papyrus scrolls, and sign language to websites, wikis, blogs, forums, and tweets. In particular I would love to see comparisons (whether backed up by statistics, surveys, or at least well-reasoned and explained arguments) of many aspects though at the moment users' expectations about the other users' usage patterns seems key as, aside from the technology's interface and reliability the other person/people seem like the largest hurdle to a good user experience. For example: I am emailing this to the listserv, hoping for some well reasoned questions, constructive criticisms on the topic/question/examples, and suggested (freely available) readings to help me on my way as I'm making this request in honest earnestness, yet this message carries only some if any of that to you. I've considered facilitating explicit definitions of the expected content and timing responses included with a communication, though lack of a mechanism or awareness to define them may not be the reason they're left implicit within the communication streams. Also simply the differences in usage patterns varies drastically: some people almost never use a phone of any kind, others flow freely between calling, texting, photos, video, and emailing from their cells. However people can carry heavy- or no-expectations of getting a response instantaneously. And the toll of having/not having all those (implicit) expectations met (dependency, anger, ?). Other interesting aspects may include: any measurements or classifications comparing informativeness, expressiveness, understandability, immediacy, reliability, accuracy, interactiveness, ease-of-use, ease-of-adoption, circles of popularity, moderation (self, peer, superior, IT, corporate, law/gov't, morality), fail over, redundancy, etc. Still the differences between sender and receiver (and if/how those are negotiated or negotiable), side effects of the modality or other influences including business or cultural (eg. cell phones are much more popular in Israel because they're cheaper than in the U.S.) including new cultural effects or sub-cultures, and how much the communication itself is shaped by the medium or process seem like significant realms needing at least summarization if not exploration. Are the best (communication) technologies the ones you don't realize are there? Or the ones that call for your attention every minute? Bonus points for including different historical versions of the same modality within the comparison (eg. initial telephones required human-operators to connect calls, vs voice-operated cellphones). Lastly may be cause-and-effect of imposed limitations after the initial technological pushes: many large companies now forbid any social networking at work and any critical messages ever, DMCA/other take down notices for BitTorrent sites, YouTube videos, and company-criticizing websites, the DMCA itself, electronic spam, many networking ports have been shut down by organizations because they're additional attack vectors for security breeches - resulting in most programs working over port 80, DTV signals are more fragile than analog signals so they cause more outages vs degradation, and President Obama needing permission (and security hardening) to have a Blackberry... Is that too much to ask? 8) Highly curious, hoping I don't have to do all this work myself, and willing to carry on this conversation in other modalities. Chris Dagnon Collaborative Communication, LLC Madison, WI U.S.A.