FIXZR

In the ‘old world’ each communications medium had a pecking order. The medium, be it phone, email, IM or SMS implied something about 1) how quickly (if at all) you needed to pay attention 2) how temporal the information was and 3) whether the communication was formal or informal. IMs could be ignored if you misses them, and a mobile call implied something urgent. Those days have now long passed and no additional attributes have been added to these (now largely unified) media to replicate the same functionality. There is now a mismatch/confusion in society about what are acceptable norms - is it reasonable to expect someone to read an email saying a meeting is cancelled, or should you have to call? How often should people be expected to stay plugged-in, and to how many channels, and when is the sender or receiver ‘to blame’ when it breaks down?

Perhaps the most worrying development in the barage of new asynchronous communications technologies (by asynchronous I mean communication mechanisms with no limit to how much information can be pumped at you) is Google Wave. It explicity unifies email, IM and ‘track changes’ style functionality for document management. A simple highlighted bold line in your ‘inbox’ could represent a simple ‘hi ya’, or a very serious change to a legal document. With no clear way to differentiate one from another, the risk of missing and important ‘message’ in the midst of pleasantries, typos corrections, and general work banter is a very real prospect.

I’d like to see Google’s engineers turn their attention to tools that help manage a recipients precious bandwidth to read information. This would require an effective way to prioritise ‘messages’, or restrict the receipt of messages based on the available bandwidth. I haven’t a solution to this, but it would probably involve some sort of contention mechanism, where people would vie for attention, competing for a limited amount of mental real estate. As important as the technical solution, whatever it may be, will be the social norms/expectations that evolve around it.