Differences in Communication Tools

This will be crude; I’m still thinking through this. Question: what are the fundamental differences between all of our various communication tools? Here’s an attempt at defining the differentiators.

Medium

• Text (read)
• Voice (hear)
• Video (see)

Sensory Input

• See
• Hear

Implementation

• IM
• Phone
• Physical Voice Conversation
• Email
• Blogs
• Handwritten Letter
• SMS
• Internet Forum
• Mailing Lists
• IRC
• Bulletin Boards
• Guestbook
• Video Chat

Delivery

• To one’s person (texting, voice, video, email)
• To a pickup point (voicemail, email)
• Designated meet-up point (IRC, Internet Forum)

Potential for Miscommunication

• Text lacks almost all context
• Voice has tone, but lacks facial expression

etc…

So the goal here is to do the following:

1. Classify each type of communication according to its attributes categories like those above
2. Enumerate the levels/depths of communication that are pursued by people, e.g. casual chat vs. intellectual debate
3. Classify the types of social situations that one might be in where they’d desire communication, and associate them with the attributes of a particular class of communication, e.g. no voice in the middle of the library, no text to communicate the passing of a loved one
4. Using these matrices of attributes, reduce all available communication tools to their various parts, and describe which might be best for a given situation (realizing that personal preference is a significant factor)

In other words, there are only so many ways we as humans can accept communication inputs, and there are only so many types of external pressures on whether one would want to use one method over another. So, would it not be possible to build a map of these logical relationships?

If this is totally silly, just let me know. I don’t mind having stupid ideas. ::