Registration Opens for NMC Symposium on the Evolution of Communication

Registration is open for the Symposium on the Evolution of Communication, a special 2-day, live online event to be held December 4-5, 2007 in the virtual world of Second Life.

For full details, see www.nmc.org/2007-fall-virtual-symposium

To register now, see www.nmc.org/2007-fall-virtual-symposium/registration

Join keynote speaker Howard Rheingold and colleagues from around the world as we explore the implications and possibilities of changing models of communication.

About the Symposium
The Symposium on the Evolution of Communication will explore the premise that technology has not only mediated communication in countless ways, but that the very ways we communicate—and even the ways we talk and think about communication—are changing as a result.

Part of this premise is backward looking, in the sense that if we set literature and the creative side of communication aside for a moment, the formal communication strategies we have been taught in schools were often focused on how to convey lots of ideas or information (at relatively infrequent intervals) and generally in the form of written papers, books, or compilations.

Added to and fueling the premise is an admittedly unscientific assessment of how we have added to those forms in recent years. A look in almost any direction will reveal patterns of communication very different than the traditional writing in which we were trained. Small bursts of information, technology-mediated for the most part, permeate our experiences, and increasingly we have people with whom we are in contact almost constantly—and more so every day, these people are scattered across the globe.

Mediated by new tools and new technologies that have made the marginal cost of long distance communication essentially free, both work and social activities are commonly shared by groups of people who need not be geographically near each other to be close. Our premise, simply put, is that these and similar trends represent a significant shift in the way we interact with others and in the way we understand the nature of those interactions.

To register for the conference, or for more information including the preliminary schedule of events, please see www.nmc.org/2007-fall-virtual-symposium.