About
Feb 8th 2007
Even a dice can roll. Digital technology is great. Precise, accurate, systematic, reliable. Most of the time. But sometimes we need something else. And sometimes less is more. Sometimes we need something a little less formulaic, a little less algorithmic and even a little less clunky. And with that we hope to get something a little more unpredictable, a little more spontaneous, a little more flowing and a lot more fun.
Communications mediated by digital technologies can lead to clunky interactions at the best of times and often get in the way of natural communication in ways that we tend to just overlook or just put up with. We are often not even consciously aware of these little hurdles and just develop a vague instinct of which type of communication tools are better in particular situations. But we are slowly becoming more and more aware that despite the promises of the ‘death of distance’ and a world of telecommuters that there is something lost when people use currently available tools to communicate over distances. It turns out that there is something very important about proximity and face-to-face that cannot be conveyed no matter how much we use IM, text, email, telephone and videoconferencing. Despite predictions of a knowledge economy powered by telecommunters and a emptying out of cities, knowledge workers are travelling more to meetings and moving into cities to gain opportunities that are otherwise lost to those who rely on our current array of telecommunication tools. Economists and sociologists are beginning to recognise what many of use have instinctively understood for quite some time. Current telecommunications tools, while fine for mediating contact, are unsatisfactory and perhaps fundamentally inappropriate for mediating many types of social relationship and interaction. Moreover, various industry commentators have pointed out that most so called social software and social networks are autistic in nature and that as a result they dictate that their users interact with one another in an autistic fashion. Just think of that. Millions of users so hungry for interaction they put up with being forced to interact with one another in a clunky formulaic way that lacks spontaneity and fun because…well, because that’s the best medium available…
Its time for a complete rethink. History has shown time and again that people have a massive pent up hunger to communicate socially. Rapidly adopting and adapting every possible communication tool and using it for social purposes. However, in almost every historical case - from the postal service to telephone to SMS - these tools were originally designed specifically for non-social purposes, with little consideration given to their possible application as social tools. (Aside: Well, that’s not entirely true there has been some thought put in that direction but mostly focused on preventing the use of such tools for such lowly purposes as idle chit-chat and even one case of one unfortunate woman being sued for using a telephone for the lowly purpose of calling out the fire brigade in New York). Nevertheless, in almost every historical case, another pattern inevitably emerged: That of the astonishment of the promoters coinciding with the discovery that people were insisting on using these communication tools for “the wrong purpose” and generating vast and unpredicted revenues via this activity.
So what? Well ask yourself what if communication tools were designed with social communications in mind from the outset? Wouldn’t that be cool? Its time to apply the lessons that can be learnt from looking at the socially autistic software we have today, learn lessons from history and start building social applications that are first and foremost socially savvy social communication tools. It’s the next generation of youtubilicious, myspacious big business (just ask Om Malik or view the Voice 2.0 manifesto here ) and huge opportunity for those that can hope to get it right.
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