In Mediated I wrote about speaking with my grandfather on his new CapTel captioned telephone, and the array of ideas which crossed my mind.

Several more conversations have been had since and we've started playing small games of cat and mouse with the captioners. My first indication they would break the veil of invisible participant was in their method of handling misspellings of uncommon names. When unsure of a name's spelling, many captioners fall back on general chat etiquette and place a "(sp?)" after the potentially mangled name. Once we've spelt the name for our silent typist it's then correctly captioned for the rest of the conversation.

In an effort to utilize this thin edge of the wedge, we've started discussing some of the questions I raised in my original post, slipping them into the minds of our captioners. Sometimes we address the captioner directly and wait for a response. The pause gives the captioner time to think about what they would say, if they could. When no response appears, we move on as if nothing unusual has happened.

Captioners would seem to be in a unique observatory position, getting a daily shift's worth of American conversation, randomly sliced. What do they hear? How will it change them? How will they act on it? Will they break the barrier and put their experience into the public realm? Write a book? Go on talk shows to explain what they've come to realize about people and politics and life in general? Create a weblog and write about it? We speculate regularly on these ideas while conversing, knowing they are listening.

Regularly listening in on the lives of Americans, at some point the overwhelming realization must occur that even in our diversity of views and situations we are fundamentally the same.

Related: Mediated