Banning Emails for Productivity's Sake

In The Telegraph, Henry Samuel reports on a major company's planned 'zero email' policy: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8921033/Staff-to-be-banned-from-sending-emails.html


Thierry Breton, C.E.O. of Atos, plans to abolish all email communication within eighteen months, complaining that most of these messages are a waste of his employees' time. He complains that too many emails are sent - there is a 'deluge' of information - and that for each one workers lose time responding and then regaining concentration on the task at hand. 


Breton, who was formerly a French finance minister and now heads Europe's largest I.T. company, plans to implement an instant messaging system to replace email. He believes email to be an outdated form of communication, but also believes that "Emails cannot replace the spoken word."



Evaluating the Electrical Telegraph

Does the electrical telegraph annihilate space and time? On the surface, the answer to this question is an emphatic 'yes'. The electrical telegraph was the beginning of the modern world, with its insistence on the instantaneous and growing globalization. But it was merely an imperfect realisation of these aims. The codes used to transmit messages had nothing like the fluency of the written word that SMS and email can now send across the world, and of course are even further from simple human speech. 


The answer I suppose is still in the affirmative, but it's certainly tinged in grey rather than a definitive black or white. The electrical telegraph did annihilate space and time, but they were to rise from their graves for the next several decades. The reliance on the direct line, the sneakernet and the system's essentially human backbone means that the telegraph was doomed to be overtaken one day by a far broader basis for communication - the Internet. 


The telegraph does not easily allow for conversation - the time involved, although perhaps not the issues of space, means that messages can be delivered, but responses are complicated and any attempt at dialogue severely curtailed by the process of transmission and translation. We certainly discovered this during our own experiment with the electrical telegraph; once communication had been established, it was difficult to restart a message, explain our misunderstanding or even work out who was supposed to be speaking. 


These issues are all easily communicated in human conversation and online by virtue of the instantaneous transmission and globalized practices. Formatting, shorthands, and tones of voice are all examples of the latter, and are used in messages from all over the world to every other part of it. There are no issues regarding international borders or extra difficulty in crossing oceans. The telegraph began to annihilate space and time, but it would take a few more developments before the nails were firmly in the coffins. 

Evaluating the Optical Telegraph

How times have changed. The African drums described in the first chapter of The Information had to carry all sorts of extraneous information in order for the meaning to remain clear, and yet now we can communicate by txt, mssng out lttrs in evry othr wrd. In our experiment with the optical telegraph, our group was sending out messages. Here, we approached the system from far too modern a perspective. We abbreviated the message as much as possible, hoping to make the job easier for ourselves and our receivers.


What we had not appreciated was the noise involved in this form of communication. The messages were far from crystal-clear, or accurately received. Many of our symbols were misread, and in fact many of them even had double-meanings that we hadn't picked up on. To avoid this, we should have transmitted different content, thought up to avoid such conflicts in meaning. We should have been more sympathetic to our receivers - it wasn't until we tried their job that we realised how hard it was to read what the telegraph was denoting.


Many of the latest communication technologies - Blackberry Messenger and WhatsApp - now show when your recipient has read your message. There was nothing even remotely close to this with the telegraph. Our receivers resorted to clapping every time they had transcribed one of our letters, which would hardly be possible across the relatively vast distances that the telegraph was designed for. Unless you can rely on others' expertise, there needs to be some proof of receipt, much like BBM or WhatsApp. Many say that's why they prefer these services to SMS - people enjoy knowing they've been heard. 





Taylor v. Gleick: Artificial Information?

In The Artificial Ape, Timothy Taylor questions our very sense of history - what James Gleick calls the "pastness of the past". He asks us to question how we, as humans, came into being, and with that throws our relationship with technology up into the air. Are we who we are because of the technology we invented, or do we have the technology we invented because of who we are?


Gleick discusses oral literature and memory in the light of our own written society. The invention of writing - and of course these days it is difficult to see it as a conscious invention - does not fit into Taylor's own argument, and is clearly an invention that changed the way we think. There is no evidence or even plausible reasoning that humankind invented writing because we could know longer remember enough and needed a way to record what used to be the stuff of memory. 


That is not to say that Taylor's argument falls on its face. Obviously he did not intend his line of thinking to apply to every form of technology ever invented, and indeed the invention of the dictionary, described by Gleick in his third chapter, did change the way we write. This is obviously on a smaller scale, but the now inherently human preoccupation with 'the right way of doing things' can be traced back to the codification of the language with the dictionary. 


The German language even has a word for it - Rechtschreibung. Though Google gives its translation as nothing more than 'spelling', my German friends assure me it carries with it a far deeper sense of correctness in writing. Such a notion could never have come out of a solely oral language, and in such a way we can say that the invention of writing did alter the way we think. And so perhaps Taylor does triumph in the end, if only in Germany.

Inculcation by Communication

It's hard to live in Winchester and ignore the cathedral. It is monumental - you can immediately grasp its scale, but it is harder to recapture the medieval mindset and recognise its ambition and its sheer presence in the landscape. The Normans invaded England in 1066. Construction of the cathedral began in 1087, almost twenty years after the arrival of these French interlopers. They brought with them a new culture, one far closer to the concept of Western civilization that we are so familiar with today. They spread it throughout England via a concentrated colonisation that affected every level of English life. The cathedral was a means of communicating with everyone, from the peasants to the disenchanted local nobles, from the uneducated to the devout. Pope Gregory the Great had written, centuries earlier, that painting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read, and so the architecture, the sculpture and the decoration of Winchester Cathedral taught the native Anglo-Saxons of the religion, the power, and the prestige of the newly-arrived Normans.