Programming & Design
The Dark Side of Communications
Communication is a basic human need, so increased communication simply makes us more human. Any evil that comes from communication is more a reflection of us than anything else.
By Larry Mittag
More communication is always better. I have imagined the marvels we will be able to produce once we truly have assumed communications
— the capability of any system to be able to communicate automatically with any other.
As with any assumption, however, every once in a while it’s worthwhile to challenge it. Are there dark sides to communications? Are we rushing lemming-like on a path to destruction, while we are building ever-present communication capability? Maybe it’s just the fact that I have been on the road for four out of the last five weeks, but lately, I’ve been considering several aspects of this
question.
I went to Alaska recently on a cruise, and I had read somewhere about cruise ships that had Internet access onboard, so I was hoping that this would be one of them. I was disappointed to find out that it wasn’t, but over the course of the cruise I really had a chance to relax, and I was able to concentrate on one thing for an extended period of time. This is difficult to do in a world where anyone, anywhere in the world, can interrupt me at any time. One of the casualties of the
communication revolution has been the rapidly diminishing attention spans of the participants. We criticize our kids for playing video games and watching MTV videos that wreak havoc with their attention spans, but the fact is that the modern world is doing that to all of us. It started with the telephone, but how many of us have instant notification of incoming e-mail? I know I have a little bell that goes off whenever I get one. I am as well conditioned as any of Pavlov’s dogs to check on the results of that
bell. I tell myself that I am multitasking efficiently, but unlike our computers, it always takes us a significant amount of time to restore the context of one task once we’ve been interrupted.
Now that I’ve realized this, I’m going to attempt to make use of that knowledge. As I write this column, I am on a plane back from London, where I have been attending the ARM Partner’s Conference. Neither my pager nor my cell phone work here. Under these circumstances in the past, I would
have made special arrangements to check e-mail several times a day or at least to make sure there is a phone number available by which I can be reached. I’ve taken no such measures here, although I have been responsible enough to check e-mail at a local Internet cafe. The funny thing is that the world seems to have survived my temporary absence quite well.
In the past, this lack of constant connection would have been a little threatening to me. I tend to like being in the center of the hurricane
and there is always the feeling that if you are not there you are out of the loop. I still get that feeling, but I also enjoy seeing things getting done from more of a sane distance. I suppose that as time goes by I will be more and more irrelevant to day-to-day operations. With some reflection I see that this gives me the chance to act more strategically. By periodically cutting off access to myself, I am making the time when I am accessible more valuable to those with whom I work.
Other dark sides
exist to ever-present communications as well. By now, I am sure that the story of the Atlanta day trader that went on a killing spree is old news, but I couldn’t help thinking about the enabling role that communications played in possibly pushing him over the edge. I don’t know much about the life of a day trader. In fact, the role didn’t even exist until very recently. I can only imagine that it is a very lonely existence. This is odd because day traders are in constant communication as
part of their job. But this means that they are constantly called upon, minute-by-minute, to make decisions with significant potential consequences to their families. I can’t help but believe this is just the first case of this happening rather than a singular occurence.
Does this mean that I have joined the Luddites in declaring that technology is evil? I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that. The day trader’s modem may have contributed in pushing him over the edge, but ultimately, he
was the one who pulled the trigger. The media is building this up to be a story about a man driven mad by the pressures of the Internet economy, but I strongly suspect that his problems predated that occupation. He would have been a high-stakes gambler at some other game if day trading hadn’t caught his attention. I feel badly for his victims, including his own family. I also wish that we understood more about why we do some of the things that we do. But on the other hand, I don’t think
communications is the core problem here. It simply emphasized a problem he already had.
Yet another communications-related dark side to this particularly sorry mess exists. As I said, I was in England when it happened. I saw the news reports that classified this as a typical American tragedy. People were talking about what a violent place America is and how Charlton Heston is making sure that every citizen owns a gun or twelve. This unquestioned acceptance of this stereotype bothers me tremendously. I think
it’s driven by the fact that television news coverage is almost monochromatic these days. I don’t mean that in an NTSC sense, but in the sense that each of the networks seems to be in a race to say the same thing. I don’t remember the last time I saw a serious debate over anything in the news.
This is one logjam that the Internet has the capacity to break. The fact that practically anyone can set up a Web site can put analysis back into the news. Convergence of opinion is caused by
the centralization of independent news agencies, but Internet communications can bring power to the people in a way that the hippie movement could not have imagined. My only hope is that this many-to-many communication does not end up getting choked off by the channeling of traffic through portal sites managed by the official news sources.
The last dark side of communications I can think of offhand is the possibility of massive failure. Motorola is certainly facing that right now with its Iridium
system. This network of low-Earth orbit satellites is, as of this writing, in dire financial straits. Motorola has announced that it will no longer be the sole source of financing for the system and has implicitly threatened to shut it down or sell it off. The sad part about this situation is that the technical portion of the system is largely in place. The execution of a viable business strategy is the primary source of the problem. Granted, the system has a few hiccups, but it is simply too expensive for
widespread use. Without widespread use, the price cannot come down. The only way to break this cycle is for either the company to take a leap of faith and lower prices to stimulate growth, or for enough users to decide the service is useful enough to warrant the high price. I would tend to bet on the former over the latter.
Most of these issues have more to do with the fact that communications facilitate human interactions than they do with any inherent evil in communications as a technology.
Communicating seems to be a basic human need, so increased communication simply makes us more human. Any evil that comes from that is probably more of a reflection of us than anything else.
An example of this might be the evil of giving someone a column that they can use as a place for philosophical musings rather than technical information. If you must, simply chalk it up to the human need to examine why we do things every once in a while. For me it is driven by the heat of summer (I am writing this in the
dead heat of July), while for you it is certainly closer to the end of the year, a classic time for reflection on one’s place in the universe. One way or another, I promise to return to a more classic approach to a technology column, at least for a while.
Larry Mittag is vice president in charge of the embedded systems division of Stellcom, Inc., a contract engineering company based in San Diego, CA. He can be reached at
larry@stellcom.com
.
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