Person to Person: Communicating the Human Element in an Electronic Age
Since its invention, the telephone has been one of our most valuable communication tools, offering the potential for humane telecommunication that allows intimacy, dialogue and the ability to form people interconnections or networks. Why? Because its mode is interactive, two-way.
With communication and computer technologies changing all around us, one of the most confusing challenges is to deal with the telephone now that it is a computer. . . a smart machine that tells itself to call forward, teleconference, and act as an alarm system.
Adding to the technical advances, we have public policy issues as AT&T divests itself this year. We have consumer-related questions, and, perhaps the most serious problem, as a recent Time cover story noted, we must deal with the fact that AT&T's new mode will pick up the pace of change, for the new AT&T can move more rapidly into these developing telecommunications formats and forums throughout the world.
This brief commentary reflects on some of the exciting possibilities, and potential problems, facing us as communicators in the era that follows AT&T's divestiture.
First some data: The Time analysis notes that we make more than 800 million calls a day, and have 183 million telephones. This reflects the importance of "the message" in our lives, and how much we require daily interconnection, both professionally and personally.
In addition, many technologies are spilling over into one another. Telephones are becoming, and becoming connected to, computers. Computers are interconnecting with cable systems and satellites. Broadcasters, both video and audio, are interconnecting with satellites.
Various communication and computer technologies are forming integrated networks — meshing into a fabric of systems carrying all information: our voices, our computer data, entertainment and information programs.
The formation of such a telephone infrastructure presents both positive aspects and potential problems in areas of technical developments, consumer options and public policy implications.
For example, the digital computer technology in today's phone opens up the potential for a worldwide "pipeline" with data traveling easily over many avenues.
Individualized phone systems will allow low-cost service in some areas, plus consumer services like fire alert and medical transmitters.
Toffler suggests in The Third Wave that "the link between communications and character is complex, but unbreakable. We cannot transform all our media of communication and expect to remain unchanged as a people."
Changes in the "plain old telephone" service we used to know will alter us as people, along with our communication patterns.
To make humane transitions, we need to interconnect. Tomorrow's telephone will make that easier than ever.