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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1996 It's good to talk - to a person WHEN we travelled less and telephones were all on the end of a wire, you could be reasonably sure of making direct contact with people. Today our world is more complex, and telecommunications seem to be doing for the travel industry what the computer has done for the paperless office. In less than eight years more than 10 per cent of all telephones have become mobile, with ever more fax and answering machines. How often do you call someone to find he or she is out, indisposed, or apparently replaced by a machine? Telephone tag is becoming an international sport. In the old days of lesser mobility there was a 98 per cent chance someone would be at his place of work, and a 90 per cent chance that he would be at the side of his (or her) fixed telephone. Call and rental charges were much higher then, and calls shorter and fewer. So there was only about a 10 per cent chance that you would receive an engaged tone, and a 10 per cent chance of no reply or non-availability. For over 80 per cent of the working day you could contact the person of your choice, and in most cases someone would answer the phone, talk to you and take a message. How different today.
Many people now travel so much that they occupy their offices for only about 70 per cent of the time, and business intensity sees them in conversation, meetings or otherwise indisposed for 70 per cent of the day. So we have a slice of the working population available to answer the phone for only about 50 per cent of the time. But there are more and longer calls, and a contact window of less than 35 per cent is not uncommon. So if we do not get a busy tone, then for at least 65 per cent of the time a machine answers, or we are diverted to a series of unanswered extensions, ultimately to be ignored or answered by an unknowing human. Resorting to a mobile phone generally sees a marginal improvement, with users switched on for over 80 per cent of the time. But there is still a 30 per cent chance of their being indisposed to the point of non-reply.
In part, this has all contributed to the growing popularity of voice mail, messaging and e-mail for fixed and mobile working. These relatively new modes of communication do not suffer from the distracting immediacy of the telephone. For many people we seem to have reached a point of needing to find a means of managing communication and information flow to restore a reasonable balance in the whole process. The limits to human communication, information I/O (in/out) and processing, are now the fundamental limits to our activities. We are the weak link in the chain of progress. A further debilitating problem beyond our limited ability to access, process and transfer data, is our inability to network. Even the Romans were aware of the problem and organised legions by tens or thereabouts. Modern organisations often rediscover this fundamental limit to human communication and control. In contrast, machines do not suffer from such limitations and can extend our abilities to thousands of people. But for us this means broadcast rather than dialogue. Within the next decade we are going to have to reassess the way in which we choose to talk to each other and machines. But the first priority is to get something intelligent to answer when we call. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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