When you’ve got a baby on the household inventory, some things change in your life. The sleepless nights were in fact over-hyped: little madam has always been more-or-less in sync with the passing of the day into night. Travel has been easier than expected, particularly with our trustworthy sling. No, it’s the loss of control over your time that is the real shift. Someone else controls your schedule. Someone small and needy. Someone irresponsible at one end and irrepressible at the other.
The most sensitive moment is when she’s falling asleep for a nap. Oh what bliss! The darling daughter is in dreamland — break out the wine, read a book, write a weblog! Your time is your own! But there is a critical section when she’s still on the verge of ebbing away from consciousness, but potentially roused by any interesting or new noise. And the most dreaded, cruel and capricious of these is a telephone call.
One way of looking at the good ‘ol telephony network is a pile of obsolete switches attached to a morass of rotting copper. But that’s not the only way. Indeed, once the switches have turned to landfill and the copper is recycled, there’s at least one artifact that we’ll have left behind. The noise of the phone ringing. And, believe it or not, that’s where the money is.
An alternative way to view the telephone network is as a billion bells (excuse the pun) installed in homes and offices. Each trilling ring has a single purpose. Drop what you’re doing! Pay attention! This communication must interrupt whatever you’re doing. Drop that child and come here at once!
Everything of commercial interest is over the moment you pick up a telephone handset and start gabbing. The rest is a trivial data transfer. Duplex audio with under 150ms latency isn’t a challenging deal in any future broadband scenario. All the money-making opportunities in conventional telephony on an end-to-end broadband network are over the moment someone answers the phone. The value is in the ring — not the voice call afterwards.
As Douglas Galbi argues in his extraordinary paper on Sense in Communication [PDF], the interesting part of communications is presence, but drawn in its widest possible sense.
The intrusion of a phone ringing is a form of presense, but not as we normally practice it. Traditional presense is “pull” based: the consumer of the presense (the “paying” party) requests it. A phone ringing is “push presense”. I’m here! My state is “pay attention to me”! Most communications systems comprise some form of presence signalling together with a media channel that transmits the user-generated content. We have seen the separation of the “presense” from the “media” channel with the rise and fall of numeric pagers that inspire a phone call to be made. The voice-enabled Blackberry device, for example, now combines the functions.
Regardless, there is always some form of attention channel. A ring, a beep, a pop-up, a flashing icon, a wave from another person. And as long as human nature endures, that attention signal will be abused. People want the social attention of others. Companies want the commercial attention of your wallet. Fame and fortune.
We’ve seen the corruption of voice calling with telemarketing, email with spam, instant messaging with spim, spim and more spim (cue Pythons: spim, spim, spim, wonderful spim!). Oh, and don’t forget SMS with random assorted carrier-conveyed gunk, your post box with junk mail, your front door with assorted flyers and religious fanatics, and random people in the street holding placards. Even pollution of social networking tools.
Indeed, interruption doesn’t even have to be abused to become a problem. You may not adopt a communications technology if it causes you to endure and create excessive interruptions. As Liz Lawley puts it on Many to Many when someone suggests she become a Skype user:
I don’t want to increase the interrupt-driven aspects of my life. I have two kids—that’s enough interrupts for any human being. Add to that a bevy of students, colleagues, family members, friends, and obligations, and a general preference for having the time and space to think through my professional communication and choose the right words, and you end up with someone who doesn’t find Skype to be the “best” medium for…well…any of her current needs, really.
What can be done about this? Well, to manage the interrupt, you need to know something about the caller and the callee. In particular, you want to know how they might be related. Is this communication important and contextually appropriate?
Ooh! But we’re the telco. We know who all the callers and callees are! We know were they live! We know everyone they’ve ever called! Halleluya! We’re saved! We can replace zero-revenue voice calling with premium attention management.
Errr … but how?
Clay Shirky argues that there does not exist a means of classifying human relationships:
In particular, I believe that a formal and explicit ontology for human relations is unworkable, for several reasons. First, I believe that most such relations cannot be expressed formally — try detailing any reasonably think relationship of yours using this vocabulary, with any extensions you’d like to add. You will need nuance that is not there, leading to so many new relations — pitchedBusinessIdeaTo, wasFiredBy, usedToRunWithBackInTheDay — that you will drag the vocabulary down the sink of natural language parsing.
Next, I believe most human relations cannot be made explicit without changing the nature of the relationship — transient states such as kindOfInLovewith, thinkingOfSeveringTiesWith, thisCloseToScreamingAt are simultaneously vital and inexpressible in any straightforward way. Furthermore, other humans can read those states without their ever needing to be rendered explicit. Leaving them out dooms RELATIONSHIP to the shallow end of the expressiveness pool.
At first this sounds rather depressing, because it makes it sound like a hopeless task to predetermine the relationship of the two correspondents and manage the attention of the interruptee. But on reflection, this is totally wonderful as a commercial problem. There is no ontology there waiting to be discovered that makes relationship mapping trivial, no last-word-on-the-matter open source project to be written.
Creating approximations to the relationship mapping problem in order to manage interruption and attention is a commercial opportunity. You don’t have to solve the unsolvable, just create an acceptable level of false positive and false negative interruption decisions on behalf of the interruptee. And the very nature of the problem invites a middleman: the callee can’t make the decision alone without being interrupted! Whether to interrupt is a binary decision, and one that has to be made. It’s much simpler than full artificial social network relationship mapping.
(Ideally you would also know in advance something of the content of the message, to determine its appropriateness within the context of the relationship. Fine for a one-shot text message or email, not fine for an interactive voice or text chat session.)
The more intrusive the communication the greater need for social framework and identity collateral. What does that mean? We don’t just want to know the relationships between people. We also don’t want you to interlope as someone else and fib about your relationships. We need to know who you are. And we need to have some retribution if you cheat. Telephony has had this for a long time. Make nuisance calls, get cut off. Make some more, and the long arm of the law follows the copper wire back to your house and makes an arrest. Telcos have a huge identity collateral bank.
Interestingly, the use of general-purpose computing devices such as PCs to take adtantage of the stupid network’s possibilities has revealed some limitations. I’ve written before about the noise, power continuity and systems managemen issues with having an always-on box at home. But the big missing standard component on a PC is a bell. Your bell limits your device’s human interrupt capability. If I turn the volume right down on my music, and you can Skype me as much as you want — I’ll never hear. The media and interrupt channels are not separated.
I’ve argued that the money in telephony is in the presence-driven interrupt decision. But there’s another way of arriving at the same conclusion. Marc Canter writes in Always On that aggregation is the money-making link in the digital ecosystem thus:
Aggregation is a killer app - that no one owns. It’s public domain. Everyone benefits from it. So is integration as well.
(Actually, you really need to follow Marc’s blog for about 6 months to grok the whole thing… just read and digest.)
Traditionally aggregation is done in “space”. For example, a portal pulls together a load of text and links into one screen. The screen is the place. But a phone call doesn’t work that way. You can normally only have one at once. Two calls at the same place isn’t of value. So instead we want aggregation in time. We want the system to suggest when is a good time to call whom. I might have a list of people I’d like to talk to. They have their lists. The presense and attention broker does that matchmaking. The interrupts are temporally shifted and grouped.
Anyway, that’s enough on ringing phones for tonight. Time to join the sleeping baby in the bedroom. Got any thoughts and comments? Great! There’s a comment form below. Please … just don’t call.
UPDATE: A little bit more from the BBC on how interruptions are the bane of modern working life.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:45 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Interesting article, as always; I believe that when you say "presense", it's possible you mean "presence".
Posted by: at June 21, 2004 01:41 PM