The Economics of Communication and Effective Learning

We talked about a wide variety of different formats for communications, in written, audio, video and live media. The following table is my interpretation of the consensus that emerged. The cost and impact/value of each format is subjective, and relative — feel free to copy and edit the table if you don’t agree.

Those formats that we seem to find have the highest value are shaded in light green: The value of books is supported by the fact that, with all the information available on-line, we’re still prepared to pay real money for them. The impact of photos, charts and similar visualizations compared to straight text is indisputable. Structured information, in the form of policy manuals and standard operating procedures, catalogues, directories, tables (like the one below) and spreadsheets must be valuable or businesses wouldn’t spend so much time producing and maintaining them. Conversations, dramatizations and stories in all media have been preferred modes of communications since before the dawn of civilization. And live demos and on-the-job training (“don’t tell me, show me”) are our preferred means of learning.

The formats that seem to provide impact or value disproportional to their cost are highlighted in the rightmost ‘cost/benefit’ column in dark green: E-mail, photographs and charts, live and recorded conversations and stories are overwhelmingly the way in which knowledge is transferred from person to person in business and society as a whole, because their value is so compelling.

On the other hand, some formats whose cost is disproportional to their impact or value (highlighted in red in the rightmost column) are quickly falling from favour: newspaper articles and radio and TV news are losing audience to blogs, and business reports are losing prevalence, being replaced by interactive oral presentations incorporating single frames and other visualizations. And lectures and bums-on-chairs powerpoint presentations are losing favour to more interactive, participatory, experiential forms of learning. Radio programs and even podcasts are valuable principally because of their convenience to those on-the-go — otherwise an audio recording of someone talking has little to recommend it over an online text transcription of the recording, which is easier and faster to browse and more suitable for search engines to spider.

I understand that there are now voice-recognition software ‘bots’ that can ‘read’ and full-text index audio and video recordings with over 80% accuracy. But the indexing challenges remain: how do you put ‘placeholders’ in multimedia streams so that readers can hear/view only the section with the search keywords, in such a way that the context of the surrounding discussion isn’t entirely lost? And what do you do when the real value of the audio or video isn’t in the words themselves, but in the interaction, the images, the media integration itself? As bandwidth cost approaches zero, how much longer will we be satisfied essentially limiting our searches to the written word?

Notes:
     * for commuters, the ability to listen to this while traveling increases impact/value to M
   ** if the content is transcribed, a full text search of the transcribed text can be searched
 *** Blog-Hosted Conversations: planned, edited conversations on a particular topic hosted by and transcribed
         on a blog or website (my prediction for the next big thing in the blogosphere)

My take-away from all this is these five Principles of Human Learning Preferences:

1. People like information conveyed through conversations and stories because the interactivity and detail gives them context, not just content, and does so economically.
2. People hate talking heads, and are increasingly intolerant of them.
3. People no longer have the opportunity for serendipitous learning and discovery — everything they read and learn is narrow, focused, bounded, and the tools they are given in their reading and research reinforce this blinkered approach to learning. The consequence is the intellectual equivalent of not eating a balanced diet — a malnourished mind.
4. People do not know how to do research, or even search, effectively. They think these two things are the same, which they are not, and they have never been trained to do either properly. It’s a good thing the search engines are so smart, because our use of them is mostly dumb.
5. People search as a last resort. They prefer to ask a real person for what they want to learn or discover, because it’s faster and the answer is more context-specific. And if there is a single good browsable resource on their subject of interest, readily at hand, and they have the time, they will usually prefer to browse that resource rather than looking at a bunch of disconnected, often irrelevant, search engine matches.