Being direct... AdVantage Jun 2002
'Improving' Human Interaction…?
I have spent a rather interesting past 4 months. I relocated back to the coast in October - ostensibly to slow down a bit, and hopefully do more teaching and writing - only to discover 2 months later (and at this relatively late stage in my life) that I should make a rather substantial investment in a new business. (What's 'worse' - it's a business that's based upon technology - and yes, thoughts of the dot.com bomb have actually entered my head!!) But, then again, I keep insisting to myself - maybe not this time. Partly because of this investment, I decided to attend a conference held in Boston USA, early in March, in order to get some detailed insight into the specific market segment to which our new business is addressing itself; and then to top it all, found myself invited to speak at a similar conference to be held in July this year, also put together - to consider the worldwide phenomenon of 'Instant Messaging', and its potential impact in Southern Africa.
The visit to Boston was to participate in a two-day event - attended mostly by the leaders/originators of this (somewhat) flegling aspect of human communication - which, as I soon discovered - means different things to different people. The delegate list read like a who's who from the class of '19whatever' from MIT. There were very few 'users', mainly application developers (…and a very interesting senior guy from Microsoft). And, boy - were my eyes properly opened.
The keynote presenter was Dr David Weinberger, one of the authors of the much-acclaimed Cluetrain Manifesto. Amongst many other things, he said the following: on average, as many as 4 out of 5 business telephone calls in the US now ends in voice-mail. This means that (certainly on the business front - but maybe the issue is more socialogically widespread than just business), some Americans may be using technologies like voicemail to make themselves 'unavailable' to 'uninitiated' communications. This could very well be a broader manifestation of communication overload, insinuated in part by vast increases in marketing communication growth over the past 10 to 15 years.
What you and I may call 'Instant Messaging' - sending someone a short message text (SMS) on your cell phone, is not the same thing in the US marketplace. It's actually 'availability' or using their preferred term: Presence. It's the ability to see that Joe Bloggs is actually on-line right now and has made him/herself available to accept text communications. The capability to actually transmit the message is almost less important than the availability of the other person to receive it. This is profoundly different to what we may be used to, and is another example of the fact that US citizens seem to be suffering from information overload, and some appear to cut themselves off from the source of such aggravation - by choice.
Instant Messaging per se started life by courtesy of AOL who saw an opportunity to enable their members to 'interact' with other members who happen to be online at the same time. By establishing 'Buddy Lists' you were immediately able to see when someone to whom you have given 'permission' - ie placed on your list - actually comes on-line, and then send him/her a text message. So successful was this (particularly amongst kids) that not only did other server networks such as Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and ICQ spring up to provide a similar service, project groups within companies setup 'project buddy lists' so that they could introduce an immediacy to their communications (and obviously their projects) that was previously perhaps hindered by blocking mechanisms. The biggest discussion points at the conference had to do with security of the public networks; the move towards enterprise IM (eg Lotus Sametime) and problems with systems interoperability.
One of the most important aspects of this whole issue goes to the question of who instigates and tries to control the communication interaction, and David Weinberger has some very strong views as to the 'battle' between control and connection. He says that firstly, humanity fundamentally displays its sociability through the need to converse. In addition, there is something called the Paradox of The Masses: Even though we are all individuals, we also relish the facelessness of the crowd. The only 'self' that we expose on the (connected) Web therefore is the outer self - not our more sensitive (but clearly more self-controlled) inner self.
This is another form of protection. An example of this phenomenon is the Review pages at Amazon.com, where people can expose their opinions - good and bad - without fear of recognition. It means that they can converse without exposure. Contrast this, he says, with the traditional control-focused point of view of many in marketing that suggests: theirs is the only 'official' orifice through which marketing 'gas' is allowed to escape. This 'command and control' approach ignores the fact that should they so choose, people can talk about brands (without fear of the influence of brand-owner 'control') - just as soon as they become connected.
Since returning home, I have corresponded with David Weinberger and made a few comments to him about 'control' 'presence', and inter-connected communication - to which he responded: 'I think that it's currently less 'present' than the IM vendors would have us believe, outside of on-demand jobs like customer support. Presence will however, become more important as the channels get linked together by newer technologies. Eg, at some point our 'e-mail' client will know where the recipient is and will be able to route the communication through e-mail, IM, the phone, a beeper, PDA etc. And then… life will really become hell…'
I guess that in the end, the fact that people can use technology both to communicate with others, AND to decide who may and who may not communicate with them - is an ultimate form of being in control, and if some consumers are already doing this at a one-to-one level, have no doubt that they can be just as selective about the perceived intrusiveness of much of mass communication.