The Opposite of Unified Communications
Straight to voicemail
The New York Times brings us news about an innovate new communications technology:
Don’t Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call
“The technology, called Slydial, lets callers dial a mobile phone but avoid an unwanted conversation — or unwanted intimacy — on the other end. The incoming call goes undetected by the recipient, who simply receives the traditional blinking light or ping that indicates that a voice mail message has been received. Ms. Gorman used a test version of Slydial that has been available for months. But since the finished product was unveiled to the public last week, more than 200,000 people have used the service…
The article goes on to state that the concept may sound like the antithesis of interactivity, but “[products like] Slydial turn out to be only the latest in a breed of new technologies that fit squarely into an emerging paradox: tools that let users avoid direct communication.”
The tools it’s referring to are things like email, blogging, twitter, text messaging, etc, which allow users to publish communication asynchronously while avoiding 2-way synchronous communication entirely.
So is Voice Mail just another communications modality? Why shouldn’t the caller be able to choose “straight to voice mail” in the same way that the call recipient can do so today? This balances the power to avoid far more equally. After all, one person’s ability to communicate is another person’s ability to interrupt.
Software, like any good tool or product, should encourage appropriate behaviour through its design. I won’t begin to pretend that this sort of thing doesn’t happen at work, but there’s no need to lower productivity. Text-based systems are a far more efficient way to avoid someone.
-John Lamb, Modality Systems
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