The communication revolution

Communications online change really fast. In 40 years we go to the phone , to the email , minitel , social media , etc.

The new generations are coming back to the audio format to communicate. However , that’s not the great call come back.

Indirect Communication

What I call indirect communication is communications that aren’t in live. You send a message and wait for the answer. Originally that kind of communication was reserved to post and mail and not instantaneous. Today your message is almost instantaneously received but the person can choose if he wants to answer now , later or not.

Internet allowed the electronic mail , email a faster way to provide written information. The message followed , it is more informal , shorter and a way to share information faster without the constraint of the e-mail form.

However this form of communication is really successful , that’s easier to choose when you want to text and answer than to call someone and hope that he is available. Except that wasn’t practical to share a long story or thoughts because that’s more time consuming to text than to talk. So now there are audio features in messaging app. You can register your voice to share information , that’s easier and you can provide more information . That was the use for my generation. For the new generation , they use audio for everything instead of writing a short sentence , they will say it. They always have AirPods so that’s not an issue to privately listen. However that creates weird situations where you have people talking to their phone in class or in public transport.

Direct communication

Direct communication with the phone was the primary way to communicate with people far from you.

The call revolutionize the way humans communicate because for the first time in history you can transmit information on long distance and with a high volume of data.

However with the emergence of indirect communication they need to reinvent the call. Why talk to someone live if you can just text that’s simpler? To make the call more interesting you needed to add features. FaceTime and Skype add the image features , you can talk to someone but also see him in direct. That’s really important , the face of your interlocutor gives you a lot of feedback on what you said. The main goal behind that is to make digital conversation as realistic as possible. What brings us to the next point. The possibility to talk to multiple people at the same time is really important. So now with Skype , Zoom , FaceTime , you can have multiple people chatting live on their device. Now with clubhouse , we can also host online presentation on an audio format available to everyone interested. Live interaction with the public is a really powerful feature.

Soon we will be able to add the camera features. The image quality and the internet connection are the only brake staying . But we can imagine that we are not far away to be able to have social interaction with everyone on the planet in a virtual world.

Company

Companies are usually the slower to adapt because they have older people , and are not really good to make change.

So I see a future where email will be for everything that is formal.

On the management side , messaging app like Slack are winning the game because they are more users friendly . And somewhat faster than email to communicate in the company. I see a future where managing team online will be a little bit like being a moderator on discord right now.

Remote work is here to stay. And applications like zoom teams are really good tools to use. That reduces by a lot the transport time and give more flexibility. However the worst with that kind of tool is when we are trying to mix remote and face-to-face work because that give an awful experience to everyone.