communication

I got a chill reading this post from Seth Godin:

So, very soon, you will own a cell phone that has a very good camera and knows where you are within ten or fifteen feet. And the web will know who you are and who your friends are.

What happens?

What happens is that you have no privacy. Seth sees a big upside.

See a dangerous driver? Send a video snippet to the clowd. The clowd collates that with a bunch of other shots of the same driver... busted.

And the clowd also knows where you are, camera or no camera. So it can tell you when your old friend is just two gates away from you, also wasting time at the airport waiting for her flight. Or it can do Zagats to the ten thousandth power by not only suggesting the best nearby restaurant (based on your food circle of friends) but can also integrate with Open Table and only recommend restaurants that actually have room for you. Or it can let restaurant owners do yield management and find you a table at a good enough restaurant at the best possible price...

This is going to happen. The only question is whether you are one of the people who will make it happen. I guess there's an even bigger question: will we do it right?

If you do what he describes, can it be "right"?

Imagine the feeling of going to the doctor for that private medical condition, and everybody knows. Imagine being stalked by an admirer or resentful ex while you go about your day. Imagine broadcast spam being pushed at you via phone where ever you go. This adds a whole new meaning to the term "cyberbullying."

The drunk driver scenario? On one level, it's a description of being guilty until proven innocent. Everything you do is under scrutiny.

And of course, not all scrutinizers are equal. It's quite obvious that the government and big business will have more scrutinizing power than your snoopy neighbor. Is that the life we want in a free society?

There at least should be a toggle-able opt-in/opt-out, yes? Or are we to live in the Matrix, plugged in with no option, doing our duty by exposing our entire lives to the machine?

To me, the real possibility of this new age is the empowerment of the individual. That's the power of free (as in freedom) exchange of information. That's the power of open source. That's the power of collaboration, mash-ups, crowdsourcing. Empowerment, not simply a cooler, sexier sublimation to the System. Isn't that the real dream? Isn't that the un-tapped economic and cultural goldmine?

This morning I was going through a working group's internal documents about best practices, procedures, etc. for coordinating communications between all of the group's members, who are scattered worldwide. At one point, on the topic of email netiquette, there was a recommendation to follow the rules of a rather emphatic post, "How to correctly quote e-mails and news posts," which is "[p]artly written by Tom Sommer." I think it was the "correctly" part that got me going here on this blog post.

Before I go on, I would just like to explain that, as someone who routinely reads and replies to over 100 emails each day, I tend to have my own ideas of what is useful and relevant email etiquette. And what I was reading did not fit my own ideas of best practices -- let alone "correctness."

So I did some Googling and found many, and often conflicting, recommendations on email etiquette. Some of them were quite old. For instance, a 10-year-old New York Times column by Katie Haftner about the evolution of email etiquette up to that point, which relates some interesting concerns that seem so dated now, and other concerns that persist today. Email has not changed much in the past 15 years.

But we have.

Some would say that we've evolved beyond email. I don't see it. The recent grand pronouncements of the End of Email strike me not so much as pithy insight than the result of the all-too-common belief that we stand at the end of time. As Audrie Schaller points out, similar declarations were made a dozen years ago, and were backed up by Pew data. Yet here we are, emailing away.

Yes, some people don't do email. They are "immune" to it, as Anne Zelenka says. I think that is more information about them, and not about the state of email in the larger scope of internet communications. Email has its uses. It fills a role that is not replaced by Twitter or blogs or txt: the asynchronous, personal exchange of ideas. IM is fine for rapid, terse exchanges; we use it all day every day at work. Twitter can be fun for brief tweets out loud about something you saw or thought of or are doing. But email fills a unique niche, and -- spam or no spam -- until someone comes up with something that allows us to exchange correspondences longer than 144 characters quickly and asynchronously, it's what we have.

But let's face it: Email is something of a mess.

So here are some of my considered preferences regarding how to do good email:

1. Keep the Subject field relevant.

   This may seem obvious, but it's surprising how many people don't do this. (And most of us are guilty of slacking here in longish email exchanges where we may change topic without updating the Subject field to suit.)

   One of the more annoying things a lot of people do is treat the subject field as a greeting. I'm sorry, but an email with the subject "Hey" is not helpful. Sure, I will see what the email is about when I open it up, but when I am going back through my emails trying to find that one about the color palette requirements for the logo design, "Hey" is not much help. Consider the Subject field the headline.

2. Quote the email in your replies.

   This one is obvious. So is pruning the quoted text to include only the relevant portions to which you're replying. That said, however....

   While some people gripe about the length of emails in long exchanges with quoted text within quoted text within quoted text ad infinitum, I'd rather have too much than too little. Bandwidth is increasing, storage space is increasing, and text is cheap byte-wise. Just use it.

3. Write your response above the quoted text.

   I don't think I'm alone when I say I don't like having to scroll down just to read what you have written. I already know what I wrote -- and if I don't remember, I can scroll down to look. When you deal with over 100 real emails a day, this becomes all the more important.

   Don't make me scroll! Please!

   (And it's all the more important in this day and age of Palms and BlackBerrys and iPhones, with their small screens. Put your message at the top of the email where they can see it.)

   This is where I differ with Tom Sommer. He claims that the "correct" way to respond is to:

   ...reply below the topics. Just as with questions from readers in a magazine, the journalists respond below the question to follow the natural reading order.

   In this way people won't have to read down and later on go back to the top of the message. Remember that most people on Usenet read many messages every day. And the responses mostly appear much later, so they cannot always remember the exact message. It is also much easier for the next person who wants to respond to your answer.

   No no no no no -- I cannot agree on this one. With the exception of discussion lists, most email exchanges are direct conversations. If the subject line is to the point (see #1 above), the context is obvious. Express your thoughts, and imply the context in your writing.

   Besides, in nearly all of my email correspondences, people reply at the top of the email. That is what people do. Why? Because it makes sense. It's fast. It's the most usable and user-friendly approach. It's consistent. To reply below is to make the thread all mixed up.

4. Avoid sprinkling your replies in the middle of quoted text.

   It's really easy to miss. It's a readability nightmare. And it tends to make a mess -- all the more so if the exchange continues with more inline responses.

   This will be obvious to anyone who has had to plow through a bunch of text, line by line, trying to find what the heck the sender has actually said. However, Tom Sommer is not alone in prescribing that you:

   Reply below each paragraph

   Digital texts have another big advantage: You can split the text and respond below single lines and subjects.

   Ugh. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

   The only time I could recommend sprinkling your replies throughout the body of quoted text is if you have an email with too many points to address all at once. For example, if I get an email with several different notes on a project, I may start my email at top with a greeting and then a sentence, "I'm replying in-line below...." This way I am alerting the recipient to what I'm up to. I do this because many people won't even see in-line responses unless they are actually looking for them.

   I seem to be against the grain on this, as Heinz Tschabitscher of About.com also pushes the sprinkle-replies-inline philosophy, though he allows that my own preference is acceptable, if "lazy."

   [As a side note: I've also noticed that inline exchanges can exacerbate any potential for increasingly heated exchanges or, in forums, especially, flame wars. Responding inline can tend to give a nitpicky tone to your reply, and provoke defensiveness. It seems to me it's just best to say what you have to say, and be done. Leave the inline responses for Q and A types of exchanges.]

5. Reply vs. Reply All.

   If the sender has people from her organization in the CC field, I feel it's safe to assume she's doing it for a reason. For example, maybe she wants all of them to know that she sent this message. Treat your reply the same way and reply to all. I find it annoying when people do not reply all back to me, and I have to end up forwarding the reply to the others who were supposed to be on the cc.

   However, if your reply is just for her, then don't clutter everyone else's inboxes with your reply. So pay attention to which Reply you click, and use your judgement. Personally I tend to lean towards Reply All, unless there's a reason not to.

   (And it's pretty much just the opposite on newsgroups and listservs: Don't reply to the group unless your message is really for the whole group.)

6. To emoticon or not to emoticon, that is the question.

   Tone is very easy to mistake in emails. Emoticons can help. You don't want to be cutesy, but you do want to convey your intended tone. Some people don't ever do emoticons. Others always do.

   I tend to avoid them unless the recipient is, er, emoticonphillic, and just about the only emoticon I might to use in email is a ;) to add a little context to a dry remark that might be taken the wrong way. I don't do :) or :D or ^-^ unless I'm being really chatty and informal.

   However, I think the various self-appointed netiquetteologists out there who vehemently oppose use of smileys in emails need to just lighten up. Seriously. ;)

7. When there's a shorter way to say it clearly, use it -- and that includes commonly understood acronyms.

   Part of "simple and direct" includes using abbreviations and acronyms. I disagree with the categorical admonitions of this 2003 TechSoup post by Wenkai Tay, which says:

   Don't fill your messages with acronyms like " OTOH," (on the other hand) " ROTFL," (rolling on the floor laughing) and " FWIW" (for what it's worth). If you're too busy to spell out anything in your message, consider sending it when you have more time. Messages that look like "Carol, LTNS. AFAIK, the report is due EOD. HTH. BFN," ("Carol, long time no see. As far as I know, the report is due at the end of the day. Hope that helps. Bye for now.") are difficult to read and best left to text-messaging teenagers.

   Hmmm. I'd like to humbly suggest, dear reader, that we have come quite a long way in the past five years. Re: acronyms, I'd like to point out that they are commonly used in letters and memos without leaving people scratching their heads. While you want to save l3375p34k for recipients who are programmers, most people I encounter today will understand, without having to think about it, what "otoh" and "imho" and "afaik" and "fwiw" mean.

   FYI.... Many of our commonly used words -- such as "car," "auto," "bike," "radio," "radar" and the list goes on -- started as abbreviations and acroynms. Even the meaning of word "acronym" has grown to include initialisms that you cannot pronounce as words, e.g., "ETA" vs. "FUBAR." We learn. We absorb. The language evolves. Life goes on.

8. Attachments: Include them only when necessary and relevant, and ask before sending large ones.

   Attaching a graphic attachment to each and every email may feel nice, but it takes up space. Not only that, if you ask me, "Did you get the document I sent?" and I go through your emails and every single email has an attachment, it's not going to be so simple to find. I know what your logo looks like. I don't need it on every email, thanks.

   Unless your recipient is already expecting that 2MB design comp, give her a heads up first. Maybe there's a better way to send it. You certainly don't want it to bounce on you.

9. Chekc you're speeling adn grammer.

   Nothing says "I don't know what I'm talking about" than misusing and misspelling words. And sometimes bad grammar can lead to confusion. (Consider the legendary, "I shot an elephant in my pajamas.")

I close with something that's more of a tactic than a stylistic rule: If you can, fill in the "TO" and any "CC" email addresses last.

It's a fabulous tip I saw in a post by Dawn Rosenberg McKay on About.com. How many times have you accidentally sent an email before it was done? Of course, if you're replying to an email -- which must account for 98% of all of my own email work -- those fields are filled in already. You could delete them and fill them in again, but if you did a "Reply All" you might end up missing somebody.

So there it is. I welcome your thoughts. Just don't send them via email. ;)

[Cartoon: We Blog Cartoons]

[update: TechDirt has picked up the story.]

[update 2: Now the Washington Post and the normally quick-on-the-uptake Valleywag have picked up on it, too. Will this story get the attention of consumers? How much will Verizon Wireless customers appreciate this new "service"?]

Via Slashdot, we see that Verizon Wireless is planning on sharing their subscribers' private calling information.

What?

Two of us just received a notice from Verizon Wireless about CPNI. CPNI stands for Customer Proprietary Network Information: our call records, essentially. What numbers we called, how often, how long we spent on the phone, and how much it cost us. (It does not include our own names, numbers, or addresses.)

Verizon wants to share this data with third parties, and of course they need our permission: “you have a right, and we have a duty, under federal and state law, to protect the confidentiality of your CPNI.”

But that duty only goes so far: “Unless you provide us [Verizon Wireless] with notice that you wish to opt out within 30 days of receiving this letter, we will assume that you give the Verizon Companies the right to share your CPNI with the authorized companies as described above.”

I don't believe I've received this notice yet. I've been squeamish about using Verizon to start with, given their opposition to things ranging from Net Neutrality to municipal wi-fi initiatives, but their coverage area has beaten all others, in my experience so far.

Yet I'll be damned if I want to have myself and those people I have called, or who have called me, end up on some phone spam list.

The fact that they treat this as an "opt out" rather than an "opt in" is also telling of their own corporate values.

And maybe opting out of Verizon Wireless' spam plan won't do anything anyway:

"If you do not want us to collect, transmit or use such information about you for the above purposes, you should not use the services; by using the services, you expressly authorize us to use your information for these purposes."

My subscription ends on Halloween. Time to look to alternatives, I think. Too bad for us that they all pretty much stink.

"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.

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Cross-posted on BlogHer.