Just two naked men and a model
Locker-room talk isn’t nearly as risque as it’s made out to be, but conversation itself is a baffling complexity
Despite all the jokes, men’s locker-room talk seldom travels along unsavory lines. Usually it’s weather, sports, cars, work, and food. This was the case the other day when I wound up talking about network technology with someone at the gym. We were in the locker room, he getting ready for the shower as I was drying off. As with most conversations, I’m not really sure how we got onto this subject:
“Bluetooth, wi-fi, wi-max, they’re all incompatible,“ he opined. “Someday one of them will win and it will just be the standard everywhere and everything will work together.“
I replied, “Actually the different standards you’re referring to all exist because…“
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“...because they fill different needs. There are different uses or physical spaces in which they are a best fit. What makes it all work together is the higher-level protocols that run across all of them.“
“Protocol,“ he said, “now that’s a new word to me.“ He paused, and leaned forward attentively.
I found myself briefly explaining the 7-layer OSI network model and how it made different functions of data transport independent of one another so different physical networks could still function together. At the bottom was the actual hardware and connecting medium, and then different layers that packaged, routed, regulated and verified the flow of information before handing it off to the application layer for the user to handle.
“Hey,“ he said, “in five minutes you just explained more to me, and it made more sense to me than anything I ever read about networks!“1 He seemed genuinely grateful and I was a little embarassed. I guess people are accustomed to seeing networks as an arcane mystery and are surprised to discover it’s only artifacts, not magic.
“Thanks,“ I said, “Have a great swim!“ He turned and entered the showers. What an odd conversation, I thought. But that the subject was as mundane as could be. The part that interested me was the unconscious travelling that got us there.
Many times I’ve heard people say, “I don’t know how we got on that subject, but…“ The phrase reveals what my old psych professor Orval Crowder used to say: “People go around asleep all the time, and if you tell them they’re asleep, they’ll wake up just long enough to deny it, then go back to sleep.“ That’s what happened here: I had not been awake. The conversation had turned right, left, straight, left again - all without my noticing. I was like a driver who didn’t know how he got home.
It’s a deeper and more profound subject than any computer network. If we really understood how conversation works, it could revolutionize education, politics, corporate decision-making, and anything else that requires one person to communicate with another (or with many.)
Compared to human conversation, the rules of computer networking are Lego blocks stuck together by a 4-year-old. Topic drift is only one of hundreds of variables, which are imprinted on a fabric of cultures, subcultures, and personal neurological characteristics. Here are a few:
- Pause time: the length of time one person pauses to indicate the other should respond
- Eye contact
- Distance vs. intimacy
- Variations in volume and inflection
- Speed
- Clothing (obviously not a factor in the conversation described here)
- Social status and the various ways it is perceived
- Taboos and less formal boundaries of topic
Unfortunately I have the feeling that conversation is like climate models - it wouldn’t do to hold your breath until the definitive textbook is written.
Notes:
1 - “...and it made more sense to me…“ I credit the fact that I didn’t have a Power Point presentation ready. That would have muddied things up real good.
2 - Oh, about that title… my son suggested I spice things up a bit to increase readership. If you were thinking the OSI model was a tall Swede familiar to celebrity buffs, sorry to disappoint you.
3 - Here’s another pretty good explanation of the OSI model. I first encountered the model in a book called “TCP/IP Network Administration” (of which I think I understood every third page or so) and occasionally it’s very helpful in understanding why networks behave the way they do.
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