tools that lubricate human communication

The telephone was an imperfect approximation of communicating with others at a distance using voice.  It was, and still is, enormously useful and a number of innovations have kept it advancing.  Perhaps the last major innovation that was realized was mobile telephony.  For good or bad we could reach out - and be reached - almost everywhere and a tool had impacted how we communicate.  

 

Great lubrication!

 

Synchronous and asynchronous data communications became important and one company successfully recognized that adding lightweight text to a mobile phone along with a form of email that was relevant to how one segment of the population would be important.  RIM made billions on the Blackberry, but it is important to realize it is only a rough tool that resonated a bit with our deeper needs. 

 

A few years later the iPhone came along with a new type of interface and a good enough window into the Internet - for most people a much better model than the Blackberry.  Of course there are some for whom the Blackberry tool is better than the iPhone (or Android) tool, but for the most part the iPhone model is richer.  

 

And now we are seeing the beginnings of a voice driven data interfaces from Apple and Google ..  There is something that seems fundamentally "right" about Siri even though it is very early in its development.  In a few years we'll begin to learn some answers.  I'm pretty sure the Google approach to finding information and human/machine communication is far from optimal.

 

All of these tools are windows into something much deeper -  us and our desire to communicate. I would bet a lot that we are much closer to the beginning than the end of a period of great change.  The Industrial Revolution took about one hundred and fifty years and we're only about fifty years into the current revolution.

 

From my vantage point I don't see the younger generation as being more adroit simply because they grew up in a new world.  They were surrounded by different tools and defaulted to them making them their own, but these tools will change.  The term digital native is popular, but I don't see the process of change as abrupt with people on one side or the other of a divide -- a rich continuum of tools has been emerging.  Some will replace old modes of communications entirely and some will serve niche groups differently.  And there are surprises when very old tools prove to be much more robust than imagined.

 

It is probably best to keep up with tools and see what serves your own needs better.  Moving to them because they are "new and improved" is the wrong approach.   This is going to be an increasingly interesting and wild ride.  Just like the Industrial Revolution some companies will have brief moments in the Sun, most will vanish and a  few will endure.

 

My intuition tells me we really haven't made dramatic changes in how we deal with time - the Industrial Revolution made an enormous impact on us that lingers even though it is antiquated and perhaps counterproductive.  Perhaps in ten or twenty years communication tools will emerge that finally rip apart our Victorian perception of time.

 

Comments

[Jean Russell]

wow, Steve. Amazing post. love the move from handwriting to typewriting to computer writing as you moved through it. Grateful. And very interested in your thoughts on time... Can you say more about that?

[steve]

Thanks Jean! This post took a bit longer than the standard 30 to an hour.

I've been thinking about time and how we have dealt with it historically for a long time now and have a few thoughts. I'll put together a series of posts on that at a later date. The Industrial Revolution and the transportation revolution that came with it and the first telecommunications revolution changed our notion of what time is and we mostly locked into it by about 1900. I think the notion of tightly synchronized and scheduled time is a bit archaic for much of what we do, but we are still bound to it. Over the next few decades I suspect we'll see some major breaks with this old notion and we will begin to see time and our relationship with it in an entirely new way.

[Chris Douglas]

Delightful reflections. As Jean was, I'm especially intrigued by the speculations about our perceptions of time. There's the move from synchronous to asynchronous communication that may restructure our practices of synchronized and scheduled time. And another factor comes to mind that will probably play a smaller but perhaps meaningful roll: thanks to digitally lubricated communication tools, every day I work with people across nine time zones. Will this kind of behavior lead to a (further) breakdown in the hegemony of the scheduled workday, and perhaps even the way in which "work" and "life" are carefully separated by the clock?

[ailsa]

love the post with the visual imagery making it so much more evocative.
Xplic8s beautifully well :)