Saturday, March 25, 2017

(How) Can We Talk?

One problem I've encountered on this blog is that there's no good way to hold a conversation here. If you post a comment on one of my blog posts, I'll see it, and I'll likely appreciate the insight and perspective, but I'm not sure how I could respond.

I, too, could post a comment on the blog post, and you'd be able to see it, but I don't think you'd be notified in any way, so you probably wouldn't know that I responded (which is a large part of why I haven't responded to many comments). I could mention a comment and then respond to it directly in a blog post. If you follow my blog, you'd almost certainly see that kind of response, but so would everyone else.

Many people get to my blog through links from Facebook, which is a much better channel for electronic communication, but I can't assume that everyone who finds this blog also has a Facebook account. (By the way, I just now realized that many of the Facebook friend requests I've gotten from people I don't know may have been from people who've found my blog and want to follow it. If that's the case for you, send me a Facebook message and I'll probably accept your friend request.) If we could open up these topics for discussion on Facebook, that would be great, since we'd both get notifications when we say stuff to each other.

Of course, if you know me personally, you could contact me through text or email or just by talking to me face-to-face, but that wouldn't be convenient, or even possible, for some of you.

Other than that, I don't know how we could hold conversations. If you have any ideas, you could share them in a comment, as long as you don't mind the rest of the world potentially seeing it. I think that these interactive conversations would be good because then we'd be more free to discuss and explore ideas. We'd learn a lot more from each other if we could communicate more effectively. This blog has been great, but it has some limitations. If we could learn how to overcome some of these limitations by learning how to exchange comments with each other, we'd all get a lot more out of this blog than we get out of it now.

2 comments:

Miriam said...

I guess you don't see this, but when someone leaves a comment, there's an option to check: "Email follow-up comments to [your e-mail address]".

Oh, I just noticed that it's a check-box under the Google Account option. The other options don't have the check-box.

So, yeah, it looks like commenters can either sign-in with a Google Account, or post their comment on Facebook in order to be notified. Otherwise, I guess they'd have to check back on the post they commented on to see if there's a response.

Andrew Robarts said...

Yeah, that sounds like it might be a headache, unless you already have a Google and/or Facebook account. But hey, if you could respond to this, that would at least be proof of concept that we can sort of have conversations about my blog posts, as long as we don't mind those conversations being public.