I just can’t hide my geekiness sometimes. When I was writing about bandwidth in the previous post about presence, I was not referring to the actual network bandwidth. I was referring to a different kind of bandwidth… the human communication bandwidth. If you suppose that people are computers and they communicate with each other through a network connection with some specific bandwidth… you can see that in real life you have specific channels of communication. Verbal is the most common one… in this, you have the basic layer of communication… the actual words… and other layers on top of it… like the tone, the rhythm, the pitch, the volume, etc. Apart from this you then have the visual containing layers like the facial expressions, the look, body language, etc. Then there is the haptic channel, the touch, the embrace, the handshake, etc. Of course, there are the smell and taste channels as well… but you get the idea.
In this book I was writing, people transferred to the future were cut off from their current sensorial input and output and transferred to the other (future) reality experiencing most of these senses through the peripheral (the mechanical body)… almost like living in another body. The taste was the higher level and peripherals with a sense of taste were supposed to be really high-end. Now… in our current situation, our bandwidth in our online communications is limited to verbal and some parts of the visual channel. Given the actual computer network bandwidth… things get even more difficult in the communication.
And this is how we can understand why we feel so connected with each other when we dance the Tango. We communicate with all those different channels and layers (taste excluded)…we are talking super duper fast network connection and zero-latency! Something that no technology can substitute and if it will be possible sometime in the future… we probably won’t live to experience it.
So… let’s try to open all our communication channels to the maximum bandwidth to receive as much as possible from this unbelievably rich musical masterpiece and amazing performance!
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