Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Use technology to communicate better

May 29, 2009 02:01 am / Add a comment

The title seem lame:  use tech­nol­ogy to com­muin­cate bet­ter.  I hear often that we already use too much tech­nol­ogy and not enough face-to-face real life communicaiton.

It seems many of us had enough of frag­mented, tedius, lim­it­ing tech­nol­ogy com­mu­ni­caiton in text mes­sag­ing, both in forms of e-mail and home­pages includ­ing blogs.  In the world of web 2.0, it was still up to us to orga­nize what we thought into 2D ways.

This again will prob­a­bly sound lame, but we’re finally on the verge of becom­ing closer to our tra­di­tional way, face-to-face, of com­mu­ni­catin using tech­nol­ogy.  ICT — infor­ma­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tion technology.

I real­ized this when I was giv­ing sem­i­nar yes­ter­day.  In 1.5 hour long sem­i­nar, the biggest (and per­haps the only!) reac­tion I had from the audi­ence of about 90 Japan­ese busi­ness peo­ple was when I did a demon­stra­tion on how I use web­cam at home to com­mu­ni­cate with my kids.   All I did was con­nect with web­cam at home, look­ing into our living/dining room with the audi­ence on the big screen, and called my 11 year-old son on the phone con­nected to the con­fer­ence room speaker sys­tem.  The audi­ence went ahhhh!  and clapped when I asked my son to say hello to the peo­ple with me and to take a bow, and he did them.  I was amazed with the reac­tion of the audi­ence.  It made me real­ize that this thing that I take for granted, which I do reg­u­larly has become nor­mal way for me to com­mu­ni­cate with my child was not avail­able a few years back.  This real­time see­ing and hear­ing the nat­ural behav­ior of a per­son to talk to them seem like the key.  I think audi­ence res­onated, because they saw the real set­ting of din­ner time on the screen, how I con­nected with my son who’s in a totally dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ment then the one I was in at the moment, saw the body lan­guage as well as the voice of an 11 years old, tense and a bit embar­racced from know­ing he’s being seen by adults, sym­pa­thized with him.  It made me real­ize that by installing this eas­ily avail­able inex­pen­sive web­cams, we’ve stum­bled onto some­thing next to the tra­diti­nal way of communication.

My hus­band installed the web­cam at our home about 2 years ago.  At first I HATED it, feel­ing like my pri­vacy was being invaded.  But then when the kids got excited hav­ing their father look­ing at them via web­cam, I decided that it was actu­ally a good thing.

Cur­rently, there’s so much issue about pri­vacy and secu­rity.  There are many peo­ple in the world who encroach on pri­vacy and secu­rity to make money.  But if we can some­how over­come our own fear and pre-conceptions, tech­nol­ogy will allow us to be more human at work­place than per­haps we have been for the past 50 years.

If only we keep on learn­ing how to use tech­nol­ogy to com­mu­ni­cate better.

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