July 1, 2003

POLLARD PREDICTS THE FUTURE OF COMMUNICATIONS, AND THROWS IN SOME ADVICE FOR TODAY This post is a guide to the different media available for communicating today, and when to use each, and a forecast of how this will change in the next two decades. Communicating an important message used to be easy: you walked to where the people you needed to communicate with were, and delivered the message. Today we have masses of tools for communicating, each of which has many 'features' that seem to have been added because they were possible rather than useful. You have to choose . So here's a guide to deciding what tool to use when. I expected to find lots of guidance on this subject online that I could plagiarize, but no such luck. Seems no one else has figured this out either. So let's use the scientific method and start with objectives. We communicate for various reasons: to educate, inform, or explain to persuade to decide to connect or relate to express oneself, or evoke an emotional response Note that these objectives are from the perspective of the communicat or, not that of the communicatee (if there's such a word). It would be interesting to do this analysis from the recipient's perspective, what they hope to get from the communication, and see the disconnects, but I'll leave that to someone with a better sense of irony than mine. Next step is to identify the general types of tool, and the different communication formats available with each tool, and specify the highest and best use of each tool, i.e. what communication it is most suited to: Tool or Medium Some Unique Advantages Face-to-face Conveys body language, allows sidebar conversations, builds trust, coordinates multiple communication media best Telephone Fast iteration of a few people's ideas and knowledge , conveys tone E-mail, Letter, Memo (anyone remember memos?) Makes the organization of complex ideas visible and easy to grasp, leaves a trail, can be saved V-mail Conveys tone, can be saved IM, Chat Immediate access, fast iteration of a few people's ideas and knowledge Weblog Provides context of communicator's other work, categorizable, allows comments back, can be saved Newsletter, Newspaper Brief, immediate, categorizable Radio, TV, multimedia Compelling, reach Videoconference (room) Visual, inexpensive Videoconference (P-to-P) Next best thing to being there Forum, Collaboration Tool (project, team) Egalitarian, leaves a trail Wiki Openness, multiple voices Format Unique Advantage Conversation Iterative, flexible Interview Structured Presentation Can use multiple media The list above greatly understates the complexity of the decision process, since the advantages aren't black and white, and apply better in some formats, with different sized audiences, and with different deliverer/recipient communication arrangements (1-to-1, 1-to-n, room or virtual space set-up etc.). But it should allow us to at least narrow the choices sufficient to make a decision tree. My first crack at the decision tree is shown at the top of this post. I've resigned myself to the fact that most people, unlike most bloggers, are slow to accept new technologies, and that most technologies are not very far along in their evolution. This first decision tree, with its preference for the tried and true, reflects this. In some cases this tree will lead to an unsatisfactory conclusion. For example, you may conclude that although you can't afford the trip to tell a distant employee he or she is fired, or an estranged brother that your father has died, the telephone is too impersonal. When that happens, go back to the top of the tree and reconsider the trade-offs. I spent most of June at out of town face-to-face meetings, ranging from a brainstorming session with people I mostly knew well, to a high-school reunion with people I hadn't seen in over 30 years, to a conference with a group of international colleagues, none of whom had ever met at all. In all these cases I concluded the meetings, though expensive, had to be face-to-face. We couldn't afford not to meet in person. But that's today. I have no doubt that in a few years (a generation at most) a combination of information culture change (watch any group of teenagers communicating, anywhere in the world, and you'll see what I mean by this phrase) and communication technology improvements, will dramatically alter this decision tree, so that it looks more like the one below. As I've said in my business posts, I see the weblog becoming a ubiquitous communication medium, a proxy for every individual, where everything you want to know about that individual (which they have given you permission to see) can be called up. The effect of that will be to eliminate many communications whose purpose is simply to get information. The blog will be the main vehicle by which we educate, inform and explain (the first of the five communication objectives) and express ourselves (the last of the five objectives). The middle three objectives - to persuade, decide and relate - are the more intense and participatory reasons for communicating, and even the much-improved weblogs of the future aren't going to be up to those tasks. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the communication 'killer app' of the future will be peer-to-peer videoconferencing. Not the bulky, cumbersome room videoconferencing tool of today, but the next-gen personal wireless webcam-based tool that will allow you to look at, and talk to, some one on the other side of the globe as if they were right beside you. For the same reason that I have predicted weblogs will transform the way in which we share information, by becoming the proxy for what you know, so do I predict webcams will transform communications by becoming the proxy for where you are. Turning on your individual webcam in the future, so others can see you, will be as simple and automatic as putting on your glasses is today, so you can see others. And just as Social Network Enablement and Social Software will connect and empower individual weblogs, so will they connect and empower individual webcams, so where you are becomes irrelevant. When that happens, importance of face-to-face communications will plummet. A little of this depends on advances in processing power and/or wireless bandwidth, but for the most part it depends on (a) social, cultural acceptance of new technology, (b) ubiquity of the technology (i.e. everyone has it) and (c) simplification of technology, so that it mimics what we do in face-to-face communications and hence becomes intuitive. These preconditions for success have a precedent: Fax technology was invented in the 1920s and was first used outside the military only fifty years later, when it became ubiquitous (at least in business), socially accepted (because it was inexpensive and faster than the mail) and easy-to-use. I'm confident that these new tools will be ubiquitous by the next generation, and that technology developers will finally make them easy to use (blog technology is still a challenge to me). As to cultural acceptance, the ability of people to speak with a distant relative every day, and see them at the same time, and the ability of parents and children, and spouses to check in with each other simply and often, will suffice all by itself. The enormous benefits to business will just be the icing on the cake. 5:12:41 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Dave Pollard. Last update: 04/08/2003; 9:13:59 AM.