In the spirit of Google reposting early rants and raves of the Internet, I thought I’d post some thoughts about communications.

My first foray into collaboration systems was around 1982, when I built a system called 000sys (arcane name, I don’t recall the history of the name exactly) at University of Virginia. It was built on an HP2000 computer system in BASIC and support single threaded conversations, instant messaging, “pages” that people moderated and file sharing. It was a remarkable system for its time and had hundreds of users at UVa. Since the system wasn’t accessible externally, only UVa users could access it.
It’s truly remarkable that in the almost 20 years since I built that system, very little has changed in the way we used computer systems to collaborate. The technology has advanced, but the metaphors are the same — lists, instant messages, e-mail, pages. What I look forward to most in the this millennium is some way to break out of that mold and really substantially change the way we collaborate using computers.

With respect to this, I’ve noticed a significant trend regarding technology and the transmission of content. It seems that technology is inversely proportional to the fidelity of the transmission. Consider the range of technology from face to face conversations (lowest technology) to Instant Messaging (highest tech) and the fidelity of the transmissions accordingly.

• Face to face (F2F)– low tech, highest fidelity. Includes facial expressions, voice inflections, and gestures as well as the words themselves.
• Telephone — higher tech than F2F, somewhat lower fidelity. Loses facial expressions and gestures but maintains vocal inflections and words.
• E-Mail — higher tech than telephone, still lower fidelity. Loses vocal inflections, but allows the communicator to at least put together well thought out paragraphs.
• Instant Messaging — higher tech than e-mail, lowest fidelity yet. Loses well thought out paragraphs of information, relies heavily on the typing ability of the communicators to transmit messages.

Hopefully we’ll figure out how to use new technology to increase the fidelity of our communications and collaboration, not continually reduce it. I don’t know if anyone else has coined this law — if not, perhaps someone will be generous enough to name it Kay’s Law of Collaboration, thereby eternally having the entire universe assume that it was Alan Kay that stated this :-).