Slick technology does not mean good communication
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When I was a boy, my mother instructed me in how to use the phone with the following words.
"Pick up the phone and wait. The operator will say, 'Number, please.'"
There were real, human operators back then. Sometimes they would tell you things that no super-sophisticated digital phone can tell you. They would inform you if the person you were calling had gone out and sometimes they would pass on a message.
For most of my life, the phone was a black device that sat on a table or hung on a wall. A wire connected it to the wall. It belonged to the phone company.
Today my wireless phone is the Swiss Army Knife of the Digital Age. It fits in my pocket, handles voice and text messages, tells me the time, reminds me of appointments, automatically adjusts to daylight saving time and different time zones, tells me who's calling and takes pictures. You can make phone calls, too.
My wireless phone gives me more options, but it doesn't guarantee better communication. It's just a tool. Like all tools, the results you get depend more on the skill of the user than on the slickness of the technology.
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Applying technology to provide easy access for societal dialog has the promise of peer-to-peer co-creation of knowledge and rapid consensus solution-building.
Today's technology holds the promise of quickly connecting problem solvers with problems, converting actionable knowledge into value that transforms the world.
Back in October 1971, an engineer (who I knew when we both went to a small high school in Upstate New York during the late 1950s) named Ray Tomlinson chose the '@' symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email.
At the time, it must not have seemed very important because Ray didn't bother to save that first message or even record the exact date. Ray Tomlinson has been called the father of email because he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. Ray made it possible to swap messages between machines in different locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans. At the time, he was working for Boston-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which was helping to develop Arpanet, the forerunner of the modern Internet.
Now, over thirty years later email messages are a large part of our lives in today's network society and I bet you can't remember the first e-mail message you ever sent either?
While email and the Internet have "changed everything" in the way we work and communicate, many are finding that reading and answering email messages can consume too much time; time we would rather spend doing something else.
Wouldn't it be great if we could harness the good parts of email communication and do away with the bad parts?
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Thanks for stopping by, John and adding your usual thoughtful commentary. Sometimes I think the "good part" of email communication is the off switch.
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The real human operators, hey i never known to this, it was we called the real customer service in terms of telecommunication.
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Those human operators, indeed, did an amazing job.
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