As seen in Image & Data Manager Magazine, Sept/Oct Issue 2003
By Frank McKenna
Love on the net
Today, many of us meet our partners on the Internet and profess
our undying love and devotion via email, writes Frank McKenna.
The email, or "courriel" as the French now insist on
calling it to stem incursion of English words into the French lexicon,
is a wondrous and multifaceted thing. How blithely we regard it with no
thought to the stupendous expansion of human-to-human communications it
has facilitated within just one generation.
This now ubiquitous means of communication and expression would have
been unthinkable to our parents or grandparents who struggled to compose
two or three letters a year to distant relatives and friends and waited
patiently for months, sometimes years for the 'turnaround' necessitated
by steamships and railways and taciturn postal workers stoically
slogging through the snow on foot.
With electronic communications travelling at the speed of light (or
sometimes marginally slower if an older, lesser megahertz, aging and
weary server blocks its path and slows its forward motion) we can
conduct almost instant conversations with associates in distant climes
with nary a thought to the wonder of it all.
Emails now easily comprise eighty percent or more of all business and
personal communications. It would be a much higher proportion had not
lawyers (the last bastion of all the paper supremacists); all over the
world resisted the trend by insisting on non-standard paper lengths,
unintelligible language and billing weight of paper. Would it be they
discovered "Tools/Word Count" on the Word toolbar they could
have abandoned this ancient form of revenue generation and made far more
money be learning how to "cut and paste" and write voluminous,
equally incomprehensible emails; charging by the word.
Have any of us really had time to think about the wonder of it all?
Probably not, because the email revolution has snuck up on society
slowly and inexorably over the last thirty years until it now permeates
every facet of our business and personal lives. When I was young we met
young ladies at church and dances, school, college and work. Today we
meet our partners on the Internet and profess our undying love and
devotion via email.
This new paradigm in human relationships came too late for me to
enjoy but it would have been greatly appreciated in my youth. It is
extraordinary difficult to mislead someone over your height, appearance
or other facial or bodily characteristics when asking for a dance,
rejection was my greatest fear and embarrassment as a young man
competing for a partner. Via email we can be whatever we wish to be
either innocently or fraudulently and all us men with "great faces
for radio" can do far better than we could in the 'olden-days'; at
least until that fateful day when we and our true-love finally meet.
Hopefully, 'she' has been as creative with the truth as we have so there
is no great discrepancy in the 'hope-versus-reality' aspirations of both
parties.
How would email have changed our past had it been available? How will
email and its successors change our future? Will the human race retreat
into a world of electronic communications eschewing face-to-face contact
in an effort to avoid contagion from SARS, AIDS, Mormon missionaries,
born-again-Christians, the homeless and relatives in need of money and
advice about which computer to buy? Will the increase in communications
further the advance of the human race or will the diminishing amount of
human contact retard our development?
What will be the next big advance after email? Will we all have brain
implants within 30 years and then communicate by direct thought as
easily as we think of a distant friend or relative? Don't laugh or
discard this idea too quickly. I think back to my coal miner dad in 1952
in austere post-war Britain and try to imagine how he could have
conceived something so extraordinary and far-reaching and revolutionary
as email.
What's next? Whatever it is you can be sure of two things. Someone
has already thought of it and someone else has already begun designing
the embryonic technology that will support the mind-mail system of the
future. In laboratories around the world the next phase in
human-to-human communications is already under development and it too
will sneak up o us just as its predecessor did. The successor to email
is out there; the majority of us just aren't aware of it yet.
