You Have Reached My Mind, Please Leave a Message

In light of Clive Thompson's assertions that we are so over the telephone call, I'm reminded of a conversation with an older colleague about asynchronous communication. Basically he was overwhelmed with e-mails and I asked him if he felt the need to answer them right away. When he said that he did I suggested he turn off his alerts, given that that sort of interruption has been proven to make you as effective as if you were smoking pot (seriously). It hadn't even occurred to him that he could turn off his alerts. He suggested that perhaps it's a generational thing. As he grew up, the primary form of electronic communication was the telephone which requires immediate presence. And while voicemail allows for asynchronous phone conversations, there's still the lingering feeling that a ringing phone must be answered, especially if that's how you grew up. That same thinking applies to e-mail alerts, and here we are. 

Except now we grow up in a world where most electronic communication options default to asynchronous. Even chat can be reasonably ignored or delayed because the person on the other end doesn't have the same expectation of instant response as someone on the other end of a live phonecall. And getting used to asynchronous communication actually swings us back to the time when all non-in-person communication was very asyncrhonous. By weeks or months kind of asynchronous. 

But here's the trick. That pendulum could swing back. The next frontier of communication (or maybe a couple of frontiers down the line) is telepathy. No, seriously. Start with the notion that eventually we'll be able to put a chip in our heads that will act like a really tiny iPhone feeding heads-up displays to our optic nerve and music to our acoustic nerve and generally cutting out the middle man of our eyes and ears. Now, it's a phone, right? Well, call someone. That person "picking up the phone" is doing it in her head, right? How is that any different from telepathy? Even our current state of wireless communication has been referred to as high friction telepathy.

When we can "telepath" each other, we're right back to having to pick up the phone again. Will we have to develop resources in our minds to "store" messages we don't want to respond to right away? Or are there still some functions we'd rather perform in meatspace?