Should We Be Looking To Streamline Messaging?

So I’ve reached that age whereby I listen to BBC Radio 4 when driving to and from work. Tonight I caught a part of Digital Human, where Alexs Krotoski was investigating whether we were all becoming techno-fundamentalists, which makes a change from people being called techo-communists.

The part that most caught my attention was email, or more to the point, how bloody annoying it gets. Email is a curse at times, people hit and run with email, especially when it’s a work email, personal emails often have some substance to them, with work emails, we set out of office replies, which were once frowned upon as being wasteful, now they’re expected. Some people are apparently setting out of office emails that tell people the email will be deleted, which is a step too far in my eyes but I understand the point to a degree, the person isn’t there to handle the email.

Another issue was to do with mobile phones and how people often set them to airport mode when they’re out of work, because if they don’t, the messages keep coming. Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Second Life and the joys of messaging.

What happens in Second Life, doesn’t stay in Second Life, many of us set our im’s to send to email, to try and ensure we don’t get hit by the cap of around twenty five messages. We don’t want to miss messages because some of them will be important, some of them won’t be, but that’s another issue. In some ways the cap would be a blessing if it were hard enforced, but then of course some poor person with a really important message wouldn’t be able to let you know they have a really important message! It’s a shame that there’s no way of setting messages so that, for example, group notices aren’t delivered to email and don’t push you towards the cap, but person to person messages are.

However it’s not just group messages that we have going to our emails, sales from vendors, whether someone touched a board, rental payments, yadda yadda yadda. Do we really need all these messages not only whizzing about the Second Life servers, but also out to our email servers?

The answer is often yes, largely because there’s no easy alternative. We can check our account histories to see if we’ve made sales, instead of relying on messages and we can go directly to a group to catch up on group notices, but that’s a more cumbersome process than directly receiving a message, even though many people discard group messages without reading them, because they’re getting too many of them. This is a rather vicious circle.

Personally I’d like group pages where you can see group messages and just be informed that new group notices have been posted, along with the link, but that still requires prompting …. with a message! Is there any way out of this reliance on automated messaging?

We seem to be at the stage whereby technology is both a help and a hindrance but this isn’t exactly new, whereas many feel that social networking is a relatively new concept, it was technically possible to social network via the telegraph system over a century ago, the difference then being that as it was a slower medium, you weren’t overwhelmed with the messages!

Moving forward something will probably come along to make messaging easier to handle, for a short period, before it once again becomes all too easy for people to send messages and all too overwhelming for people to receive them, however when it comes to Second Life maybe we need to take a step back and ask whether we really do need to have a message sent to im informing us that someone touched our welcome boards, is it really so important? I guess if we had databases where the information was stored so we could just glance over it, rather than receive individual messages, that would be an improvement, but again, would we look or would we want an automated reminder?

Maybe we are techno-fundamentalists.

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