As an MBA student with a tech background, it’s no great surprise that I’m a member of LinkedIn (you can see my profile here). After I voiced an opinion on one of the questions (there’s an open “question & answer” section where people post a variety of questions, often related to business, and other folks post responses), the author wrote me back and in the course of a small discussion pointed me to a Wikipedia link on Paul Watzlawick. It’s a quick and fascinating read, especially the part about Watzlawick’s five basic ideas on how communication works (which implies that, if any of these are interfered with, communication breaks down).

It is interesting to watch ye olde blogosphere move towards audio and video posts, and away from purely text means as communicating online. In part, it seems this might be related trying to increase the richness of the communications channels, which makes a lot of sense in context of Watzlawick’s comments on metacommunication. Comments on blogs as an attempt to regain some of the cyclic nature of conversation: there’s a reason we at least desire the illusion that we’re not just speaking into a vacuum. Keeping an eye on webstats perhaps serves the same kind of purpose, although to a lesser extent.

And now I need to do some homework…