Broadtexting: A Business Case for Eavesdropping?

My mother-in-law, who lives across the street from me and my wife in San Francisco, told me that she had recently received calls from loved ones in Uganda, Germany, Australia, Italy, L.A., and Iowa – all on the same day. She also recently downloaded Skype and bought a Skype phone to be more connected with her friends and family around the world. But when I tried to chat with her via Skype - from neighbor to neighbor, across the street - she didn’t know how to reply and sent me an e-mail the next day.

This seems like a cute episode from a pre-communications age but it also shows how deeply global conversations have penetrated our everyday life. And yet, we are still fascinated with today’s communications technology and its capability to connect us to remote locations and cultures. These days, telecommunications is both means and end and more than anything else it shapes our personal identity in public life. With communication becoming ubiquitous, the appeal of being a part or a silent observer of a mediated conversation has only grown stronger, which has spawned some interesting offerings:

Lufthansa offers Wi-Fi Internet connections on some of its transatlantic routes. Interestingly, the flying Wi-Fi hub is diametrically opposed to the hubs of the airline itself. Here, it is the hub that moves whereas in the airline's flight network the links move while the hub remains static. Both networks produce a lot of chatter – the air traffic control talks to the pilot, and the passengers e-mail, chat, or skype with others. And now some airlines have even begun sharing some of this chatter with the passengers – during a United flight from Austin to Dallas a few weeks ago, the pilot announced that it’d be possible to tune in to the ongoing air traffic communications on channel seven. Another example is MTV and other networks that have introduced on-screen public text messaging during shows. Furthermore, blog aggregator Technorati has been experimenting with the “Technorati Mini” which provides a constantly updated "conversation" view of real-time blogging in a mini window on the user's desktop.

Some projects to capture and recycle world chatter are more artful: The so-called "Listening Post" machine allows users to probe into all the unrestricted Internet chat rooms in the English-speaking world and "dredge up thousands upon thousands of random sentences even as they are being typed. The casual remarks, desperate pleas, and lecherous queries that are sucked out of the stream of world chatter are then relayed in various ways on the two hundred or so small screens and ten loudspeakers that make up the machine's public face. The found words and sentence fragments can be strung out at random on the display monitors or made to race across the screens in constant streams, like a Times Square zipper. Better yet, a speech synthesizer can read aloud from the found chatter—either intoning words and sentences one by one in a sepulchral English announcer's voice or chanting and singing them in fugue-like overlay."

Maybe it is time to create a central online hub for all this network chatter, a true meta-conversation - let’s call it chatter.com (or chattr.com) for now and the actual communication mode Broadtexting. It may look like a Jenny Holzer-display of everything that’s being said, right now, everywhere, and it may turn eavesdropping into a consumer experience and a potentially viable business model. Whether they telephone, chat, or e-mail, users may opt in to the public broadcast of their conversations on chatter.com. While this will not work as a default feature (as the recent Facebook disaster has proven, users appreciate the option to choose), an optional checkbox for “broadtexters” who are eager to share their words with the rest of the world might soon become popular. The audience is waiting.

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