Pass it on...

Image ©Elsewhere

 

 

Retro kind of sums up what's happening to this feed at the moment, although it's not through any sense of misplaced nostalgia for any of my pasts. It really is a case of choosing the right tool for the job. The laptop, desktop or whatever is the generalist par excellence: capable of doing all manner of things almost simultaneously in real time. But not being focussed these devices can squander time in needless distraction. Like much of what passes for the world of work these days, it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking we are being productive when all we are doing is reflexively reacting to unnecessary prompting from our machines.

Now that this has been internalised by most of us, we can spend a significant portion of our day actually doing very little of use. Emails, texts and a host of other forms of communication can become a substitute for work itself. How many jobs consist in merely passing messages on from one person to another, practically all day long? The corollary to this is bandwidth overstretched with all the noise: there really should be no need for gigabytes of inbox space. The medium was intended to be terse and time-efficient. When used correctly it works fine and can save both time and effort. But when it is substituting for richer forms of communication; letters, phone calls, face to face conversation etc, it is generally semantically poor. When we had the business, we adopted email very early on: probably before the web took off; to us it was an ideal medium for conveying straightforward messages on highly focussed sub-topics discussed more fully, in context and in a richer medium: a kind of internet telegram if you will, to mention one of the oldest and tersest forms of remote messaging. If texting, tweeting or emailing carried the kind of premium costs that telegrams did, people would be a little more sparing in their usage.

We discovered the folly of trying to use email as an in-depth form of communication very early on. People usually simply only responded to the first topic in the message. Any subsequent topic tended to be ignored, necessitating a second or third, shorter email to be sent to elicit the answers required. Having said that, I still sometimes try to cram too much into email and texts, although for the most part I do prefer one-liners to screeds of stuff, something quite a few Twitter users would do well to heed. That is another perfectly fine and terse environment that is often misused by running tweets together as long, chaptered documents; something it was never designed to do and definitely does very badly.

I think part of my interest in retro tech is simply that some forms of communication are being swept aside by this tide of generalist, quick fire messaging. The well considered and constructed document, be it a letter or a company report carries far more weight and communicates far better than the shotgun fire of half thought out emails, tweets and texts that pass for communications now.