Reach out and ??? someone
Last Thursday I needed to get a hold of Jeff, so I phoned his cell. I got his voicemail (a rare occurence) and left a message telling him to call me back that night. He did not. Throughout that night I kept my MSN Messenger open hoping that he would appear online. He did not, so finally I sent him a quick e-mail with the substance of what I wanted to talk to him about. Jeff phoned me back the next day around noon with no idea why I had wanted to talk to him, having received my voicemail but not my e-mail.
If I want to get a hold of my sister, I know that the first thing to do is to call her cell phone. If she doesn't pick up, it means that she's at work, so I will text her instead if it's timely. If the issue is not timely, I will send her an e-mail. I never call her landline at home.
If I need to get a hold of Dan, I will phone him at home and then at his office. If he does not pick up, I try to find him on Skype, and if not, then I send him an e-mail.
If I need to contact Dana, I text her. This never fails.
My point, and indeed I have one, is that the age of social networking has actually made it more difficult to get a hold of someone than in the days when the only option was to phone a landline and leave a message. Everyone has their own unique Social Network Fingerprint, so to speak, prioritizing some platforms and programs over others. I normally use MSN Messenger, but I still use Yahoo Messenger because one of my friends is on Yahoo but not MSN. A few of my friends, including Jeff, use G-Mail chat, but I don't, which is why I didn't think to check for Jeff on G-chat on Thursday. A friend's brother uses Facebook chat as his primary chat program.
With all these choices available, it's miracle that we can even get a hold of people, especially when we really need to. Exhausting all options becomes exhausting as we try to remember which friends privilege which programs. I guess I'm just waiting for the day when we simulateously, collectively develop the power of selective telepathy and can just 'think' to the person we want to. Collective (but controlled) telepathy would solve all the problems detailed above. After all, chat programs, e-mail, telephones are all external ways of engaging with others. What we really need to do is to tap into something closer to consciousness—something that does not require the mediation of phones or computers—to bypass the clutter that is keeping us from reaching others. Is that too much to ask?
1 comment:
I was just thinking about the same thing, actually. There is no longer any consistency in the medium to speak to a large group quickly (even though most social networking programs were designed as such). We can't force all our friends to actively participate in facebook or check their emails regularly or get a cell phone, etc, etc.
At the moment, it seems like the only option is to do just what you described in your post: consider each unique contact as linked to their own unique set of media. Is it a lot of work? Yes. Especially when you consider that many people change their preferred media set with some regularity (e.g.: I use to be up on my facebook stuff, but now I'm rarely there).
This strikes me as mostly caused by the promise of "instant" communication. Sure, the technology we have is pretty instant, but is there someone on the other end there to receive it?
Some form of consistency on an instant would be nice, but I'm not sure a competitive marketplace will allow that (unless some device converts multiple feeds into a single output... and even then... will everyone use it?)
Maybe we need to take a step back from the promise of instant communication and resign ourselves to the use of some consistently used medium that may not be as instant as the alternatives. But could we even do that? Have we gone too far?
Hmm....
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