Ventrilo: The Online Evolution of the Telephone

Neil Fastabend

Dr. Farman

DTC 375: Language, Texts & Technology

26 January 2009

Word Count: 818

Ventrilo is an online voice chat program widely used by the computer gaming community. Once a private or public Ventrilo server is set up, dozens of people are able to connect to it for free and easily talk to each other, allowing for very quick verbal communication that is very desired to online gamers. However, you don't have to be a gamer to see the advantages of such a program. Instead of calling friends on the phone or chatting with them online in instant messages or chat rooms you can just have all of your friends connect to a server with Ventrilo and talk to everyone at once as if you were all in the same room together. This ease of connectivity and the use of verbal communication instead of textual is what makes Ventrilo the best way to communicate with people online.

The ability to connect with multiple people at once in a type of verbal chat room is what makes Ventrilo unique. You get the feeling that you are talking to an actual person more than when you are typing to them in a chat room or instant message. It is more like a phone call with all of your friends at once except you don't have to worry about how many minutes you have left or whether you're getting charged for long distance. With this program you can talk with people on the other side of the world as if they were right next to you.

The use of verbal communication brings the people using it closer together, and it feels much more personal than using text. Since you are hearing the voices of other people you can hear how they are saying things, and what words they are putting emphasis on so it is much harder to misinterpret what they mean as opposed to using text communication, where someone you're chatting with can sometimes easily take what you typed the wrong way. It is also much nicer because you can easily identify the people that are talking by their voices rather than having to memorize many of the odd screen names people sometimes use so that you know who is typing.

Verbal communication is much easier to use and allows you to do other things on the computer while talking to people because you don't have to constantly watch instant messages and chat rooms. For this reason, computer gamers like me prefer Ventrilo over any other type of communication. It lets you continue to be in contact with friends and other people you're gaming with when you're playing and unable to use text based communication. It is also as fast as a telephone so you are able to communicate very quickly, allowing you to quickly let people in your game know what's going on so they can react before it's too late.

Ventrilo's use of verbal communication is an evolution of the telephone, which supports McLuhan's idea of that all new media comes from older media. However, Ventrilo does move past the idea of the telephone by allowing you to talk to more than just one person at the same time. It is more of a cross between the telephone and a chat room, where instead of text, all the people in the room talk instead. This has allowed Ventrilo to become a unique form of communication in it's own right.

The main advantage of voice communication with Ventrilo can also be a disadvantage to it as well. Many times when people are on the computer they are at school or at work and it is not always appropriate to be talking. You wouldn't want to use Ventrilo during these times because of the possibility of interrupting people that are talking or disturbing other people trying to work. For these reasons, the use of voice chat is limited to more private uses such as at home. It can also be troublesome to use when you have a lot of people in one server talking at the same time. Unlike chat rooms, using voice chat means that you have to talk one at a time, otherwise it is hard to understand what people are saying.

Even given the few disadvantages of voice chat, it is still a very quick and easy way to communicate with friends and family. Being able to hear the voices of people you know makes the conversations much more personal and involving, and you get the feeling you are interacting with the actual person you're talking to, rather than just interacting with your computer. As the technology evolves, voice chat programs such as Ventrilo will become much more widely used, and will begin replacing a lot of the text based online communication, allowing users to become much more involved in their conversations online.