“If you need to communicate something important to a friend, do you call? Visit? Email? Text? Skype? WhatsApp? Snap? Tweet? Message on Facebook or LinkedIn? (…)
As more and more tools become available, we seem to have accepted the notion that communication is “contextual”: LinkedIn is for work. Facebook is for friends. Snapchat is for close friends. Texting is for something immediate, if not urgent. Slack is for your team.Twitter is for public broadcast. Skype is for long distance. Phone calls are for intimacy or something really important.
And a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that email is, well, good enough.(…)
If the email is more than a few lines long, I don’t read it.
If I don’t get the point in the first couple of lines, I stop reading.
An email from a stranger asking me for something (without context or an introduction) gets deleted.
If an email comes in at the wrong time (i.e., I’m hyper busy), it probably gets buried and doesn’t get read.
It is so easy to misread someone’s intent or emotions in an email that it can lead to embarrassing situations.(…)
We are social animals, and we communicate A LOT through the intonations of our voice and our facial features.
(…) Where Will Technology Help in the Future?
(…) Telepresence/Beam: (…) Telepresence robots like the Beam (and its future derivatives) are the next best thing to being face to face. It really gives you the ability to move around and participate, as if you were there in the flesh. (…) Technologies like the Beam will expand our sensory experience when we communicate.
Virtual Worlds: (…) A world in which two individuals can have their near-perfect avatars have conversations and interactions not possible in the real world. (…) This is the direction companies like Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity are taking us.
Brain-Computer Interface: The ultimate form of communications will materialize in the following decade, as we develop Brain Computer Interface (BCI) — the ability to connect mind-to-computer and computer-to-mind. (…) ” read full article