Dis-Unified Communications
I'm old enough to remember when snail mail was just called 'mail' and when digital communications meant putting your forefinger into the correct hole on a rotary dial telephone like this one.
[caption id="attachment_730" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Rotary Dial Telephone"]
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If I heard the front door open, and something hit the floor followed by the clang of the mail slot, it was just like saying 'You've got mail'. Incoming 'electronic' messages were presaged by the original ring tone: a metal hammer repeatedly striking a brass bell.
Now, in the modern version of the digital age, I have two landlines, an answering machine, voice mail, voice-mail-to-email, a dozen email accounts (several 'hidden' to avoid spam), a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn account, a Skype account, an MSN Messenger account, an AOL Instant Messenger account, an internal project tracking/messaging system. And a mail slot where, to this day, I can still hear the outside door swing open, the thump as the junk mail hits the floor announcing that I've got mail.
So after 30 years of the relentless march of all things digital into my formerly analog world, instead of an easy life of flying cars and a perfectly safe personal nuclear reactor, my life now consists of spending hours each day just checking to see if Bob sent a response to my urgent plea for help via email, Twitter, voice mail, SMS, Skype or whatever.
Granted, I can now be among the tens of millions who are the first to know when Sarah Palin('s ghost writer) tweets that she just saw Russia from her back 40, or that the new Beeb (as in Justin, not the UK-based broadcaster) is lunching on PB&J.
Would I have cared any more if, back in the dark ages of the mid-70s, someone had taken the time to rotary phone me with these explosively important factoids? I probably would have gone back to work thinking 'What lunatic was behind spreading that bit of useless information?'
So welcome to the world of dis-unified communication, a world in which not only is the medium the message, but the noise has become the signal.
-g
