The trouble with trying to count to three via online videos.

How much lagtime is possible before communication
is no longer communication?

After watching these talks I had the curious sense that, like a perfect heist team, each was filling in each other's gaps with their own points and skills to make a truly robust network of ideas. In the end, I had to admit that I could see how it might (hypothetically) change the world.

The main theme here I found throughout—the latent potential of human possibility which arises in particular conditions of shared interest—fascinated me. It made me think differently about the definition of a team, how all it really takes to make a team are the three constituents Chris Anderson talks about—the crowd, the light, and the desire. With McGonigal moving from those constituents to the potential implications, I thought these two talks were the backbone of this quartet. 

Although I bought into Anderson's three constituents for networks, one hesitation I had was the extent of his jump to how effective Internet video was in being able to utilize them. For example, though I thought that his forwarding YouTube as the printing press for oral communication was spot on… But I think that in saying video globalizes oral communication jumps to some conclusions as to what oral communication actually is in the first place. You'd have to agree, first of all, that online video is analogous to face-to-face communication, when I think this is a stretch. Rather than actual communication, I think that online video is closer to what Clive Thompson would call 'experiential memory', only shared or communal experiential memory—what Wikipedia might be described as doing for 'semantic memory'—rather than true face-to-face communication. As Thompson wrote, in Aristotle's Phaedrus, "Semantic storage was shifting from inside the brain to outside" (117), and for Gordon Bell and his peers doing their 'lifelogging', episodic memory was going in the same direction. These internet videos are a huge reserve of communal memories—they let us share memories, I feel, mores than truly communicate with them. 

What the printing press did for alphabetic text with its shared written ideas and symbolically-induced experience, online video's tightly-braided modalities does for visually-induced experiences and the storage of experiential memory.  (even though I would argue that alphabetic text can contain just as vivid of experiential memories too, but since more freedom is given to the reader as far as what experience he or she gets out of it, it's perhaps less authentic to the original experience than what the tightly braided modes of video can capture—as Anderson's example with the 'Jove' platform proves). 
It's true—watching videos and being able to respond to them weaves a lot more information (and information the human brain decodes in very adept ways, as Anderson states) than alphabetic text.  Videos can contain nuances of expressions to inflections to gestural implications—the whole gamut. But our ability immediately respond and control the flow of information as we would be able to in true face-to-face communication is severely clipped. The comments and responses possible are, though quick, not immediate, and like Anderson says, they're not exactly as eloquent as or as information-packed as a face-to-face reply might be. Of course, we toss videos back and forth across the web (oftentimes even targeted at a single entity) with gusto and great speed— but at its heart the conversations here are, like alphabetic writing, done only in retrospect.

I could see how our technologies are rising to this challenge, however. The up-and-coming social media site Periscope is coming close, where you are pinged when those you follow are giving live broadcasts which you can then tune into. Though it doesn't give the option to broadcast yourself directly back at them simultaneously, but Skype is an option but outside group chats your 'networks' can't grow too large. In that regard McGonigal's talk took it even further: with games, we can interact with people in increasingly realistic ways in real time. As virtual reality pushes further into realm of real-reality, we could start to talk about true face-to-face communication happening (and, more importantly, networks like the interacting street dancers happening) long-distance.

I think that a fascinating bypass of realism is the what games, social media, and all our other communication forms are doing currently: putting us into the same team. This is different from normal competition, where it's one on one or one against many. In a team, we do feel a sense of competition and urge to do better, but we're not just doing it to prove ourselves against others: we're doing it for the good of everyone else on the team. What's more, because there are others working within the team toward a common goal, it relieves the pressure from the individual, meaning that (like Dash's Oceans 11 reference or McGonigal's hypothetical heist team) everyone is contributing with their strengths. 

A fascinating combination of talks.