Transterrestrial Musings

1. 
   MfK

   November 5, 2012, 2:24 pm | #

   I would evaluate these factors differently. For example, any new mode of communication that is asynchronous and impersonal is a godsend to me, not a source of panic. I used to be a prolific letter writer, but when e-mail came along, it expanded my range of contacts, and was faster than mail…but still asynchronous. Texting is now almost my primary mode of communication after face to face speech (I avoid the telephone).

   Just more proof of Osborn’s First Law: Different people react to different things differently.

   • 
     wodun

     November 5, 2012, 2:41 pm | #

     I get upset when people make me check my voice mail. Stop wasting my time send me a text!

     • 
       ken anthony

       November 5, 2012, 2:58 pm | #

       I’ve had my non-smart phone for years and never had my password, so I can’t check my voice mail. I just haven’t bothered to fix that situation either.

       I’m thinking of getting a Nexus 10 and Basic4android. Any thoughts?
   • 
     Bruce Hoult

     November 5, 2012, 5:08 pm | #

     I’ll be 50 next month, so maybe a bit of an old fogey in society, though possibly not in this company

     I’m down to maybe 5 minutes of honest to goodness phone calls a month. I disabled voicemail eight years ago. My SMS use is down from a couple of hundred a month five or six years ago to maybe 20 (even as my “free” ones went from 0 to 50 to 250 to 2500).

     Even my email is down to the point that I probably average one a day or less with an actual human being (as opposed to mailing lists, grab-a-deals etc).

     But I’ve made 47000 tweets in 45 months, and probably a considerably higher rate of messages in mostly Skype chat (plus a little AIM and YIM!).

     The thing about twitter and skype is that I have them on every device I use, and can switch seamlessly between them. I can start a conversation on my phone, grab a laptop for some serious typing, then back to the phone. And no one knows.

     If typing gets too hard, I switch to voice or video on skype. Once again, I can do those with someone anywhere in the world, practically for free, on either my phone or my computer.

     But mostly I stay async with twitter and skype chat.

     • 
       Paul Milenkovic

       November 5, 2012, 6:51 pm | #

       Wasn’t there this Slashdot meme of “In Korea, only old persons use e-mail”?
     • 
       MfK

       November 5, 2012, 8:11 pm | #

       “I’ll be 50 next month, so maybe a bit of an old fogey in society, though possibly not in this company.”

       Young whipper-snapper!
2. 
   Al

   November 5, 2012, 3:42 pm | #

   Still waiting for a cheap, automatic voice-to-text.

   That is: You can leave a voicemail, but I get an email (or text, or whatever).

   The reverse is also handy. That is ‘read my emails back to me’. There are times when one form trumps the other.

   I’ve seen tools that do both, but I haven’t seen it combined, decent, and decently priced.

   • 
     McGehee

     November 5, 2012, 4:49 pm | #

     Google Voice converts voicemails to text — and you can send them individual VMs for them to tweak their algorithm.

     Though looking at their success rate now as opposed to when I first started using them for voicemail (both cell and my separate GV number), I think the tweaking has tended to make things worse rather than gbetter.
3. 
   Robin Goodfellow

   November 5, 2012, 4:29 pm | #

   Well, I can’t manage to get by the spam filter, so I’ll just leave my comment over on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/41aLHL80

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