The Medium Alters the Message
How much is “the culture of the Internet” really the culture of connected PCs? As someone who has just started using a cell phone (for talking, not messaging, so far), I am wondering about this a lot.
Will the cell phone change how I interact with people, or will I simply use it on rare and urgent occasions--my current approach? I prefer e-mail because it lets me interact at my own pace, on my own schedule.
It would be overgeneralizing to say that the Internet is American and the cell phone is European (or Japanese), but there are interesting crosscurrents of technology cultures and regional cultures that are now being illuminated: Does technology enable tendencies that already existed? Or is it creating them? Why do Europeans adopt cell phones so readily, while Americans use e-mail more?
When we talk about Net culture, it’s already at least two cultures--the culture of the Web and the “original” culture of e-mail.
The Web is a great information source, and it is becoming ever more interactive as more Web sites add not just search tools but facilities for users to answer back or perform transactions.
E-mail is taking on some of the culture of the Web with applications such as FireDrop’s Zaplets (I’m an investor) that maintain an e-mail conversation, structured or unstructured, at a private page on the Zaplets Web site (https://www.zaplets.com). Zaplets assumes you are online full time--not a feature of e-mail culture.
These two cultures are closer to each other than the newest manifestation of online culture--mobile culture, or the culture of people using cell phones, whether for voice communication or, increasingly, short messages.
While e-culture expects the recipient to sift through a lot of information, m-culture requires the sender to send the right information at the right time. (Spam is a far greater sin in m-culture.)
While e-mail culture assumes you have a personal computer, and Web culture assumes you are sitting at it, m-culture assumes you are online as you move about--though with a smaller, hand-held device and probably lower bandwidth.
All these cultures will change over time. Web culture will grow to encompass streaming video and videoconferencing; mobile culture will change from nuance-rich phone calls and conversations to short messages and quick transactions by cell phone. Some features will merge as mobile services include e-mail and the Net offers videoconferencing.
But perhaps the biggest change will be the transformation of unstructured communications media into structured applications. Instead of an “unstructured” conversation, with rich information as in e-culture or rich emotion as with voice, there’s a form of “structured” query-and-response messages that some kind of business application keeps track of in the background.
For example, after selecting the product, did Alice order it? Juan sent out a message “inviting” six people to the sales meeting; have they responded yet, and how? (The system will send out a reminder to those who haven’t and will send a summary of the “transactions”--yes or no replies--to Juan.)
To some extent, people will pick their medium according to their inclinations (or their boss’ inclinations); to some extent, the media will change how they interact. The challenge will be to use the media to assist in communication rather than to deaden it. And to do that, we need to understand the implications of the kinds of tools we use.
First of all, m-culture (mobile) is real-time and quick, whereas e-culture (loosely, e-mail and the Web) is store-and-forward, delayed gratification and offers at least the opportunity to think before you respond.
M-culture is great for making things happen quickly and for sharing decisions quickly--as long as the people involved are available. By contrast, e-culture makes it easier to work across time zones and to share rich information across a wider range of people.
When people communicate by phone or message, they get instant responses and can make decisions, but the conversation either never exists or vanishes (though there may be a transaction record); with e-mail, the record--the discussions before the decision, the varying points of view--remains for all to see afterward. E-culture is more inclusive, in the present and after the fact.
Likewise, e-business is good for shopping, browsing, comparing product details and viewing photographs, whereas m-business is about quick price checks and transactions.
While e-culture assumes the user has a complete system, m-culture encourages the user to “outsource,” with applications such as sending a data-rich fax or file from a central server rather than keeping it stored on the user’s device. Need a printer? Send yourself a fax.
I thought of all this when I met with a start-up called Nerve Wireless, with plans for a WAP (wireless application protocol) business tool set that would let the user manage an enterprise from a cell phone, with structured messages to manage contact lists, scheduling, reminders and various work processes. “Manage an enterprise?” I asked with some disdain. Well, a small enterprise or a team or a project, anyway!
Later the same day, I asked another start-up team about its use of communications media. “Well, we use e-mail to send files around, but we never could have built our business as quickly without our cell phones,” said one team member (even as another member excused himself to take a call from a prospect).
While e-mail is often pilloried--properly--for leading to misunderstandings because it’s flat and lacks nuance, voice mail can impede human communication too, but in other ways. Phone calls foster one-to-one communication; people may be getting different messages, because each person usually talks to only one other person at a time.
Voice conferences are frustrating for other reasons, and group voice mails are still usually awkward and stilted. The new mobile message systems may help, because the same short messages can be delivered to many people at a time. However, because they are short, they lose the nuances of voice mail or one-to-one conversations.
Where does it go next? Behind the immediacy of voice and short messages, as well as the flexible interfaces of the Web, sit huge traditional systems, with customer databases, accounting systems, inventory records.
The question is, when do you stop feeling you’re interacting with other humans and start feeling you’re interacting with a bureaucratic system? That’s the moment that Nerve Wireless is trying to delay, by making its systems lightweight and friendly, and that every start-up should be trying to delay by using its systems for communication rather than process.
It’s the moment I hope to avoid personally as I become a better communicator by using voice or short messages or e-mail--each as appropriate.
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Esther Dyson edits the technology newsletter Release 1.0 and is the author of the bestseller “Release 2.0.” She is also chairwoman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Questions and comments should be directed to Esther Dyson as edyson@edventure.com.
