February 07, 2006
OPINION://The Last Word in Telephony
This is the second part of my ETel closing keynote on the future “ultimate communications experience” — hence the (double entendre) title. It follows yesterday’s essay that helps us reflect on where we are. The second half of the deck focuses on where we’re going.
Rather than focus on particular features and functions that are missing to attain the “ultimate experience”, I thought I’d try to re-frame the debate about what personal communications systems are for. By far the most imaginative exposition I’ve seen is Douglas Galbi’s epic 190-page Sense in Communication (big PDF). This encyclopaedic white paper documents the past, present and future of “presence”. But Douglas uses the word in a much wider context that smiley icons showing if your friends are online.
Unfortunately, the paper is also wholly inaccessible to the layman, so here’s my attempt to extract the essence. You might want to refer to Stuart Henshall’s parallel notes for another perspective once you’ve scanned this essay.
At the heart of Douglas’s message is the idea that there are three fundamental modes of communication.
Information transfer is understood by geeks. They grok bitstreams, Shannon limits, and encoding. Similarly, storytelling is the domain of the humanities and arty-farty folk. But the public value above all else the sense of presence of others. Geeks really don’t get this concept.
As befits an economist, Douglas notes that there is a production and consumption cost for rendering each of these communications modes down to text, images and audio. The relative costs of these has also changed with time. Images are now relatively much cheaper to produce and consume than they were only a decade ago. The Web revolutionised the economics of sharing text.
The three modes are not mutually exclusive. A single piece of media or communication can embed all three forms.
So what our communications tools do is offer us “port holes” to other places and times out of current physical sight. Media rushes through those port holes. The job of the tool is to minimize the cost of producing the message, and maximize the value of the message to the user. Obviously, you’re limited in the value you can create by the number and nature of the port holes you have access to.
Traditional telephony gives us a two-way audio stream to another place at the same time. A tool like Skype adds in the ability to exchange text; and you get a sense of whether someone is at their computer from the presence icon. A fuzzy, incomplete, subconscious mental image of the other person’s setting forms in the back of your mind when you see that presence icon.
So as an example, here are some swans in the grounds of Linlithgow Palace in central Scotland last November.
Except they’re not. What you are seeing are some glowing phosphor dots or liquid-crystal filtered light coming from your PC’s display. You interpreted them (very easily) as being swans. I spent some effort taking the picture; you spend some effort interpreting it. As a result you got a “sense of swan”, and a port-hole punched through space and time.
So I think you get the basic idea.
As Peter Cochrane noted in his opening keynote, telcos don’t get emotional impact. They’re stuck in a mindset of solving functional user problems. But as Maslow noted (and whilst you may disagree with his model but the point stands), people are in search of higher things that aren’t easily pigeon-holed into functional needs like finding the nearest hotel for some sleep or a restaurant for food.
The swans were rather boring. The emotional impact was low. So how about something with more oomph?
Here’s one of Douglas’s many examples. The “wow” media experience of the 16th century wasn’t going to see Star Wars or The Matrix. No, it was to travel half way round the world to see the Hamzanama Folios. About 1400 were produced, and around 250 remain. I went to see a few Mogul scrolls myself in the Victoria and Albert museum:
The pictures just don’t do them justice. They’re extraordinary. The detail, the shimmering colour, the sense of emotion. Yes, you really get some “sense of presence” of those who 500 years earlier were motivated to create these masterpieces of art. They are truly, utterly sensuous.
Some people just have presence, and boy do these three have it in bucketloads. But that “presence” a Churchill had when he staggered into the room isn’t readily replicated with our tools.
Note how the picture invokes a sense of good and evil; the resonance over space and time of deeds great and vile. This image has a sensuous impact. Douglas’s belief — backed by plenty of evidence — is that it is the sensuous impact of a medium that people desire.
If some people have presence, others feel it. As little Carol Anne sensed, there were others out there, and they were like us. Indeed, we are like automata locked inside a permanent ink-blot test. We cannot but help look for the monsters in the closet! We are engaged in a perpetual search for the sense of other; identifying those that are alike us. We have a Pavlovian response to our “new email” icon; the sense of “other” contacting us must be followed! Yet how do you feel when your “new email” icon turns out to be some automated message compared to one from a friend? Why can’t the system distinguish the two and reflect that in the presence status it conveys down in your Windows system tray?
Here’s just a great example of presence called Budapest Heat. It’s the Hungarian entry from a Europe-wide art competition. Inside are a whole load of aircon and heating units, plus plenty of pipework. A mobile phone inside receives updates of the current temperature in Budapest. Air blows out from the contraption heated or cooled to that temperature. The same air is routed around the interior to make the surface temperature that of Budapest. And to pop the cherry on the cake’s icing, the whole thing is painted in thermochromic paint so the colour changes to reflect the current temperature in Budapest. Sensuousness galore! There can’t be a more emphatic way to insert some “Budapestness” into your surroundings anywhere in the world.
Let’s say you know that there’s a demand for a “Budapest temerature system”. Left to the geeks in information-transfer mode, it would be a digital readout on the wall. The everyday artists might have an analogue display encased in some over-designed case. Yet this is the purest presence-centric representation you can imagine.
Another example was from Media Lab Europe, now sadly shuttered. I haven’t been able to get a picture, so it’s just from memory. They had a video camera recording people coming into the lobby of an office building. On the wall they projected the images of those who had passed by in the last 30 minutes. The frames were automatically selected to minimize the overlap between people. Each person faded out over that 30 minute period. So this gives you a sensous time-smeared view of the “presence” of those inside the building. Contrast this with the “space-smeared” Budapest Heat example above.
Here’s another example of sensuous presence from Media Lab Europe. When your significant other comes online, the plastic flower on your desk blooms. From an information-centric viewpoint, it adds zero value. A binary one or zero can equally be displayed as a desktop icon. But from a sensuousness standpoint, it’s in a different league.
This one is a port-hole in space, but not time.
To change tack a little, here’s some examples from the cover art of Led Zeppelin’s album called Presence. This is done by Hipgnosis, also of Pink Floyd album cover fame. The images centre around the “festishist object” (their term, not mine). This object is simultaneously both present and absent. It brings out two points. One is that absence is the shadow of presence, and also deserves sensuous representation. Ever written a love letter to an absent partner and sprayed it with scent? (Nope…) Felt the smell in the clothes of someone departed? You’ve got it. The other point is that “unexpectedness” is a facet of presence. When someone comes back from two weeks of vacation, their presence needs a different sensuous form to when they have been around all along.
So we’re done with examples of sensous presence. How about some un-sensuous presence in our current toolset? It’s kind of sad. I’ve written before about how presence representation can be improved.
In this case you can’t see any history of presence; the time of day there; the weather; if they’re busy; who they’re talking to; what kind of device they’re on. The information architecture is a dumb alphabetical list with no awareness of social relationships. When you meet your buddies in a bar, you don’t ask them to line up alphabetically, I hope!
It’s also totally “unidirectional” presence. Imagine we can co-listen to your music, and change the volume and skip (for both of us!) for tracks we like like/dislike. The sense of “other” is thus re-inforced.
Why can’t I leave a “presence tickle”, where I just merely think of you, and re-assert our social connection? Why can’t I click on a few buddies and have my avatar in their IM client give them a wave?
I then went on to give some practical examples of applying these principles. Bother examples were lifted from Douglas’s paper. The first is that voice messaging is likely to slowly supplant SMS for many situations. SMS has a high cost of composition and consumption, and offers precious little sensuousness. The other was the need to integrate telephony and photography into a “show and tell” experience. MMS fails as information transfer, storytelling and presence mechanisms.
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I like your current line of thinking, as said before I think you are onto something well worth exploring!
But:
1) I do not get "absence is the shadow of presence"? Eh?!?!
2) SMS production is quick if you watch those thumb wizard teens. And consumption is better in many cases than voice mail because as you talk with people you can read txt messages - it needs less attention to consume.
For #1, think of it this way: if you see a "shadow" and not a "thing" then the "thing" musy be somwehere else. But the shadow itself demonstrates that there is a "thing". So it does communicate information about the absence of it. Um. Maybe I should have done a bullshitting course, or read more philosophy textbooks.
For #2, that's kind of an interesting argument. I wonder if there's also something about the personal "abbreviation style" of SMS that conveys some essence of the other person to you, giving a "presence lite" effect? The immediacy of SMS compared to pull email or slow-to-access voicemail also suggests it offers more presence that the raw textual medium alone would suggest. OTOH, push-to-talk is a big hit where available, so SMS could come under some threat.
Posted by: at February 10, 2006 03:31 PM