On Things New and Old

This week, I had an opportunity to participate in my first conference call. I know, I must be behind the times, right? As I hear it, these days conference calls are standard for many business people, and I have to admit I understand that they save tons of money and time by getting their teams/groups together via phone.

I have to be honest, though. I found it pretty strange. Very impersonal. That may sound weird coming from someone who is online as much as I am--I don't consider myself a technophile or expert, though I guess I am online more than some people. There is TONS of stuff about technology and the internet that I don't know, and I"m not always on the cutting edge of things (i.e. I'm simply not that cool). I finally got an iPhone after Easter (which I'd planned to do in June but my Blackberry's unfortunate--and yes, I swear, accidental--dip in water spend that up). However, I didn't rush into getting apps (to the confusion of my husband) since, upon discovering I could download a Kindle app on the iPhone (and thus saving hundreds of dollars) I spent my free time for a week reading Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw.

I'm not a fan of technology for it's own sake, and I DEFINITELY think that simply using (or not using) technology says little about your/our ability to interact authentically with people. I am still convinced that people are largely the same online as they are offline (once they learn how to use a tool). For example:

• Someone who shares too much information online, probably does the same thing in face-to-face encounters.
• Someone who interjects awkwardly into other people's lives in person, is probably doing the same thing on Facebook.
• Someone who is way too impressed with themselves in person is probably Twittering way too much about themselves.

That said, there are certainly bad developments in technology, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there are some new technologies that are more prone to misuse than others. I believe that teleconferencing may be one of those. Think about it. Okay, a blog may be a fairly impersonal thing, but you can still get a person's tone from it, and you read it like you would any written material. It's like a letter written to a bunch of people. Like those Christmas letters that half the world seems to send. But you know what it is and what it isn't (and if you don't, that's not the writer's fault necessarily). But spoken communication--what about all that stuff about 70% of communication being non-verbal. Now, that's hard enough to deal with in a regular phone conversation, but with ten people on the phone? Gee! You don't even know who is talking half the time. You can't gauge the group's sense like you could if seeing their faces, and it gives too much permission for people not to participate. Video conference would be better, but gosh, how I longed for a good old-fashioned face-to-face meeting after that conference call!

We all have those things that seem to weird for us, don't we? And we all take some new things and some old, and really any of us are prone to get stuck on some form of technology (my transition from a Blackberry to an iPhone was somewhat of a "long" process...i.e. it took me like 3 months to decide I wanted one). Things change much faster these days (experts tell us that, I'm not just making that up) and we have to constantly be on the cutting edge of everything. Whether that's technology, music, media, social media, cultural trends, whatever, we don't have to just follow the trends like lemmings, but we cannot stop learning and changing.

About a year ago, my husband started using Animoto to create videos for camp, etc., after seeing it used at a conference. We've really liked using it, though until today, I hadn't used it for probably six months or so. And you know what's happened in that time? They've added the ability to insert videos, even stock videos into the videos they create for you. This is a minor thing (and something we saw coming), but that one change totally changes what you can do with this tool.

That's how things are today. Constantly changing. And keeping up isn't really an option. Keep up, or your old fashioned. So maybe that's the thing...maybe I'm not old fashioned at all. My preference? Video conferencing. Next step, gotta admit I expect that someday we'll get to have holographic conferencing. Seems so far off, but then again, a lot of things once did...