Communication by default

"Do you Twitter?"

Last week I asked my co-worker that, and he said with a groan, "I'm trying not to." Apparently I was not the first to ask. In fact, I don't think I know anyone who spends any significant amount of time online who hasn't been asked that question ... several times. I joined Twitter in March, tried using Jabber to connect (which works ... sometimes), downloaded Twitterific (which works ... mostly), and spent long, long hours trying to figure out how Twitter can in fact be relevant to my life. I found some bon mots, but despite the evangelizing wisdom I've seen out there, Twitter still strikes me much like its real-world analog: pleasant noise in moderate levels, but a cacophonous mass of Too Much in larger doses. (The Twitter server seems to agree.)

Lest you think I'm just a cat sullenly gazing up at the tree full of conversation, I have a theory....

Transportation 2.0

Way back when, travel was done only with a purpose. First you had a purpose, then you decided to travel. I recall reading Edvart Rolvaags frontier novel, Giants of the Earth, struck by the hardship of the day-to-day-life, living in a mudhut, working by hand on hard prairie soil. To go on a visit was an extraordinary effort, often taking days or weeks.

The transportation explosion changed things, and the habit that once had been the exclusive province of the aristocracy became the practice of regular folks: the social visit. First you decided to visit, then you figured out what to talk about, what to do.

Scribe 2.0

Before Gutenberg, written communication was just for the rich. But even as the printing press spread throughout the land, publishing was enough of an ordeal that you didn't undertake it without a purpose.

Then "desktop publishing" came along, and sending out a newsletter took only a ream of paper and a stamp (or intra-office mail).

Communication 2.0

Communications used to be a real hassle. The Napoleonic may have brought us War 2.0 in the form of artillery and total war, but communication dispatches had to be conveyed by ship or horse (or Horse 2.0) or semaphore. It might take months or years for a message to find its destination ... if it made it at all.

Then wireless came and changed everything, much to the displeasure of gentlemen businessmen accustomed to working three months out of the year and navy captains not wanting to hear from their admirals on a regular basis. Communication across great distances became easier, and while perhaps never totally casual, certainly much more common than before.

In the early days of the telephone, a similar thing happened for wire communications. Telegrams were expensive and involved a precious amount of work.

THEY WERE SHORT AND TO THE POINT STOP

The telephone came along and that started to change, but only slowly. First, the equipment was clunkly. It required shouting. It was useful only if you had an important message to transmit. Eventually wire improvements and handsets came along to change things. However, those of us old enough and having relatives in rural country may recall the party line, where several homes shared the same common line.

Oh, and when you got a call, other people did listen in.

Most of us, of course, grew up with many extensions in the house -- maybe even multiple phone lines. We'd call our friends, and then decide what to talk about. "Telephone ear" was a common malady back then. I don't think I'm alone in having left that behavior when I left adolescence. And when I left the Bells for cellular, it just got to be too costly to simply gab for hours.

But now there's instant messaging and VOIP. Jabber and Yahoo and Skype, oh my!

Information 2.0

Time was when it took effort and research to get information. Those of you old enough to have watched first runs of Bewitched will recall how getting any kind of information took quite a bit more than a twitch of the nose. You had to go to the library -- if there was a decent library around -- and look up possible leads in the card catalogue (using actual physical hand-typed cards) to find a book in the stacks -- if they had the book at all. If a book on the subject even existed.

And before libraries, all you had was gossip, the newspaper (if there was one), the clergy or, if you were of the proper caste, a university.

With the computer's bringing in the age of the "information explosion," all that changed in ways that it's too easy to forget just how uninformed we were before.

And isolated, for as hard as it was to get information, it was even harder to convey it. Try typing your essays on mimeograph "ditto" paper. You could usually get only a few dozen copies out of it, and the first thing recipients did upon receiving it was smell the paper, then read your text ... if the ditto came out clear enough in the first place. Blogging it ain't.

Now we reach the internet age where websites are conversations and every day it seems a new start-up announces a new way to communicate, and the world (or some of it, anyway) goes a-Twitter with delight. Sign up and communicate! Figure out what to say later!

It's changing the way we deal with each other and the world. It's communication by default.

Now, to be fair, not everyone is a-twittering their days away. As Pew reported last week, only 8% of American adults are "avid participants in all that digital life has to offer." And yet the report (pdf) also found:

27% of all respondents said they feel overloaded, and;

67% of all respondents said they like having so much information available.

The second question addressed whether people think computers and technology give
people more or less control over their lives – or make no difference. In response:

48% of all respondents said computers and technology give them more control over

their lives.

16% say computers and technology give them less control over their lives

29% said these things make no difference.

...which seems to indicate that we aren't eccentric in our habits but rather are simply early adopters of what others will eventually embrace, or at least tolerate reasonably well.

Or so is the hope. Here we are, all talking to everyone, listening to everything, communicating without having anything in particular to communicate.

How are we to cope?

Tara Hunt offers a theory:

Personally, I think that there are many different types of brains in the world. Those that require linear, logical thinking. They do awesome on traditional IQ tests, SATs, LSATs, etc. They are great at focusing in on one piece of the puzzle and coming up with solutions. Information overload would be a huge distraction from the task, but they are usually quite adept at filtering it out. Then there are also those that think very abstractly and that can piece together seemingly unrelated data points to uncover new frontiers. These are the explorers, the radical free thinkers. They quite often have dropped out (or been kicked out) of post-secondary institutions. They often make no sense. Chris is one of these. He’s constantly distracted. Constantly. All over the place. But he thrives on too much information and comes out with these amazing visions that blow me away.

Me, I’m an information broker. I reside somewhere in between the logical and the explorer never quite able to pioneer or to compute. But I’m really good at understanding, then translating the information into more actionable items. The opportunist/entrepreneurial brain is similar to the information broker brain, but it takes that translation and creates tools that help people cope with both ends of the spectrum. All ‘types’ of brains are necessary to get anything done, but the explorers are often undervalued and misunderstood (throughout history, they have often died penniless, having the opportunists and information brokers taking their ideas and profiting). I believe the outcry on the idea of continuous partial attention today is equally misunderstood and undervalued.

Confusion can be good. Lack of the feeling of security can be freeing. Embracing the chaos can open new doors. And there is always the chance that it could lead nowhere, yes. But that is a lesson in itself.

Color me too logical, and too creatively self-absorbed, to embrace confusion induced by a roar of communicated-by-default-and-what-is-communicated-is-secondary messages. Besides, you have to plow through a lot of tweets like "Drinking a glass of water" or "@joebloggs: I agree" to find a rip-roaring funny like "Hadn't pooped for five days. Got home and took one so big my ears popped."

2.0 2.0

We're so in love with reinventing the world, we tend to forget that we are not in fact standing at the end of time. The world has been changing all along, and not only is it changing now, it will continue to change. Even change keeps changing.

And while we, perhaps more than any other generation, are keenly aware of just how much our world is changing, we still tend to fall into the trap that somehow we are able to capture that lightning, bottle it up and define its essence. The simple fact is that, ten years from now, we could be looking back and laughing at how excited we were in this time, much like we now look back at the fetishizing of technology that was the thrill back in the 1950s.

What's the next 2.0? I'd like to think it at least doesn't have numbers and decimals. But what do I know? I'm stuck in the here and now.

Cross-posted on BlogHer.

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