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Inter-personal communication is a very interesting subject. “Remote” inter-personal communication, which means communicating with one another using various means of communication, without actually being in physical proximity, is even more interesting to me. And the last decade has been extremely exciting in that manner.

A few weeks ago a tweet sent by David Ohayon got me thinking. David wrote (in Hebrew, sorry!):

“Once people thought video calling would be the future. The future proved that people would give up even regular calls for text messages”

This, in fact, was tweeted just when I was reading a very interesting article in physog.com called “A facial expression is worth a thousand words“. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, found out that we are able to recognize facial expressions in motion (for example, in a movie) far better than in a static photograph.

That, of course, correlates to my impression of how video conferencing, which brings the user facial expressions, gestures and body motion, is a richer and much more profound experience than any audio call (or e-mail).

So how can both of these contradicting facts-of-life co-exist? How can it be that while I’m amazed on a daily basis with how much richer visual communications is, even I seem to spend a rather great deal of time writing SMS messages instead of calling, short e-mails instead of meetings and tweeting instead of blogging?

I think that we are looking into two different experiences here, both of which become extremely important in our personal and professional landscapes: on one hand, staying on top of everything, despite the ever-increasing flood of information; on the other hand, collaborating in effective and meaningful ways with friends, peers and colleagues.

KISS and Make Up

2009 was a year that proved that “the message is the message”, to quote the very interesting New York Magazine article about Barack Obama. It was a year where the wonderful data flow of real-time information convinced everyone that this is what the future will look like, but at the same time showed us that we are very close to a dreadful overflow.

The common solution, or so it seems, is keeping it short and simple (KISS). Short blog posts (which I simply can’t seem to write…), short micro-blogging messages, short and simple bottom lines, even short URLs.

And so it does seems like a waste of time to hold a phone conversation, when a short e-mail is sufficient. And if the matter can be solved via an instant message or a SMS, it’s even better. If you find, at the end of the day, that you haven’t spoken to anyone but still managed to get your work done, don’t be surprised. It’s the 21^st century, baby.

A Global Marketplace

On the other end of our lives, collaboration becomes essential. Everyone knows that the Internet has turned the world into one big global village, but to harvest this power you need effective ways to communicate and collaborate.

Google, first with their Docs suite and just recently with their Wave prototype, have proved that people can collaborate without any need for physical proximity. The ability to co-edit a document, share thoughts, share videos and images, communicate through video conference – all of these make the world not just a global village but a global marketplace.

It seems that everyone is working on enabling to collaborate better, as close to a “real” physical collaboration or even better. Giants like Microsoft and Cisco, Video Conferencing vendors, Consumer Electronics vendors, start-ups, you name it. I suspect that this trend will continue in the next decade, up to a point where physical proximity will be regarded as redundant.

Inter-personal communication is a very interesting subject. “Remote” inter-personal communication, which means communicating with one another using various means of communication, without actually being in physical proximity, is even more interesting to me. And the last decade has been extremely exciting in that manner.

Using SCOPIA Desktop on a Mac for video conferencing and chat

And so, although quite contradicting in nature, both of the ideas I started this post with are very true and valid in today’s inter-personal communication world. The more choices we have for communication, the more options we have in making contact. The “trick” is to know which one to use and how.

In professional language this is known as “effective communications”. But this is really a subject for another post.