I just want to pick up on a few things that at first glance seem unrelated, but may have a common thread.
David Weinberger notes how the the Internet has imposed the informal “Dave” name on him, rather than the “David” he is used to as his moniker. The use of a colloquial name is just a symptom of a much deeper shift in term of how people in (for want of a better term) “online communities” relate to each other. You can have a semi-personal relationship with a much wider social circle.
Moving on from this very individual example, Howard Rheingold famously documents how personal wireless technology is creating changes in how social interaction happens. I’ve experienced this myself. Once my brother was picking me up at Heathrow airport, and our arrangements consisted of a flight number and “see you there”. So I was standing outside arrivals with my mobile phone, trying to locate him. “You’re next to the Heathrow Express lifts?” “Yeah” “Well so am I and I can’t see you!” “Near WH Smith?” “Yes!” “By the arrivals escalators?” “Yes”. Eventually we twigged that the Terminal One domestic and international arrivals are on different levels, and we were only 10 meters apart — vertically, not horizontally. The phenomenon of such ambiguous meeting rituals is well documented. Distance is a function of more than geometry.
An unanticipated consequence of the Internet is change to the human genome. Yep. You read that right. Sat opposite me is my Lithuanian wife, and sleeping soundly in the room next door is our daughter. It’s no secret among friends and family that I met my wife on-line while she was doing her PhD in Edinburgh. No Internet, no chance we would be together. No wife, and our wee monster would have remained a twinkle in the eye. And that would be one less Anglo-Lithuanian-American in the world. (Oh yeah, and if it wasn’t for email I wouldn’t have stayed in touch with the friend who encouraged me over to the USA, so the Uncle Sam would have one less citizen by birth…)
The ability to meet with like-minded people over greater geographic distance is changing how we mix our DNA into future generations. On one hand we’re less likely to marry the cousin twice removed next door. On the other, maybe we’re more likely to marry someone with extremely similar interests and outlook, because we can filter the field more tightly. (Perhaps one day when bar flirting our Bluetooth phones will be negotiating a genetic match with each other as well as passing phone numbers back and forth?)
So, what’s the common communications industry thread to these? The profundity of the social, economic and demographic change wrought by the Internet and wireless technology is only just beginning to be seen. Wikis at conferences that change the dynamics between platform and audience, blogs that cause political change, instant messaging in the enterprise changing the power structure during meetings. Some brought about by the end-to-end freedom of the Internet. Some a by-product of closed — but unwired — carrier services. But the changes we’re seeing are much deeper and harder to predict that the relatively superficial services conceived in the initial boom era. What we’re called. Who we know. Who we are. We most certainly live in interesting times.
The conseqence of this complexity is that it is almost impossible to understand the uses and drivers of new technology. The most successful communications products tend to be simple ones that can be bent and hacked into multiple uses. Think text messaging and camera phones. Complex products that have all the use cases burned in at conception are likely to fail.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 03:43 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Talking geek here for a minute...
This shows that loose functional coupling is better than tight procedural coupling because it provides a flexibility and an agility to cope with change.
When was the last time you asked a technology vendor, "how coupled is your architecture? have you separated out your procedural task flows from your functional domain services?"
Survival of the fitness - the ability to evolve and change - has a lot to do with underlying DNA. Perhaps publicly listed technology companies should be required by law to post the coupling metrics for their products/software?
David
Posted by: at March 25, 2004 12:03 PM