Communication

In 1945, an intelligence officer wrote a letter to his three-year-old son on Hitler’s personal stationery.

“The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe,” he wrote in elegant cursive. “Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”

Last year, the letter became a permanent addition to the CIA’s private museum in Langley.

Continue reading "This year we should all go a little bit postal" »

“Hello, is that Mrs Brooks?”

“No sorry – she hasn’t lived here for about nine years.”

“That’s OK, this isn’t a personal call. If I can just have a moment of your time…”

And so it begins: one of those irritating telemarketing conversations that makes you wish you’d picked up typhoid instead of the telephone.

Continue reading "There is an escape from the clutches of a hawker" »

When I was growing up, my family had a tattered, handwritten book of friends’ phone numbers sitting next to the landline in the kitchen. If we wanted to call someone who was more of an acquaintance though, we’d have to look them up in the phonebook to give them a bell.

Times have changed. Today, if you want to get a stranger down the end of the line you probably won’t hunt for their number in a phonebook. You might look them up on the White Pages website and find their landline number, but who needs Ye Olde Home Phone in this day and age?

More than 10 per cent of Australians don’t even have them anymore. It’s a number that’s sure to climb. Landlines are both irrelevant and surprisingly moneysucking. You aren’t likely to find many from this mobile-only demographic in the White Pages either, because there’s not a whole lot of numbers starting in 04 in there. So this brings me to today’s obvious idea: make a White Pages for mobile phones.

Continue reading "FOOI #15: Make a White Pages for mobiles" »

The right to digital access, should be a right we expect like a right to equality, or accessibility.

Recent debate about the price households will pay for their broadband as the National Broadband Network (NBN) is rolled out, has raised issues such as affordability.

As that debate continues, it is important to also focus on the need for digital inclusion to improve quality of life, and on extending opportunities - particularly in employment.

Continue reading "The digital divide is a denial of human rights" »

Yesterday’s announcement that the NBN finally made it to the mainland was good news for the many Australians who have deplorable access to broadband services. But why did it take so long?

Simple: Australia’s communications policy-makers are bounded by a centrally-controlled, single-solution approach that has been around since the time of the telegraph. This model leaves no room for innovation, encourages contractors to artificially inflate prices, and stalls whenever a skeleton can be found in the closet of the head honcho of NBN Co.

When the Canadian Samuel McGowan brought the telegraph to Victoria in 1853, his plan to become a telegraph entrepreneur was thwarted by the Victorian government’s decision to rollout the telegraph network as a public monopoly.

Continue reading "The NBN’s the culmination of 150 years of cock ups" »

Every time my train goes under Central Station, my phone calls cut out. There is - despite what people who have real problems will tell you - nothing more infuriating. It’s 2011. Obama has promised a Mars mission and I can’t even get reception in a tunnel.

These aren’t the only techno gripes I have on this mediocre day of April. How come I have an app on my phone that tells me which M. Night Shyamalan movie sucks the most, but I don’t have one that brushes my teeth for me? Why am I still losing car keys, tying my own shoelaces and having to move my eyeballs to focus on a different point in space?

Why are we wasting money on things like better healthcare and infrastructure, when we could be inventing a gizmo that detects and automatically scratches itches? How is it that in this wondrous age of techno-wizardry, my mouth cannot yet produce milk to go with my cereal? C’mon!

Continue reading "The iPad 2 - it won’t feed the hungry or cure the sick" »

“OK before we get going, I’d like to unpack some issues. What I want from you is blue sky thinking, people. A brain dump. Try to wrap your minds around our mission-critical objectives. We’re creating a new design language. There are some terrific synergies right now. This is a unique opportunity to value-add for our stakeholders. Think of it as a paradigm shift. Your time starts now.”

Is it just me or is there an awful lot of corporate speak around at the moment?

It’s worse than two years ago, when Don Watson wrote his third anti-jargon book, Bendable Learnings.

Continue reading "Quit leveraging your dialogue" »

The growth of the internet as an information and communications tool has always been tied intimately with the promise of connecting people beyond geographical and ideological boundaries, of expanding our knowledge through unprecedented access to multiple viewpoints.

This ideal is still embraced by some, notably in discussions of the “Twitter Revolutions”, but in a practical sense it’s as relevant as a physical Encyclopedia.

For most of us day-to-day internet use is fast moving away from providing individuals real choice, and ironically this is due to the “personalisation” of the web experience.

Continue reading "Big Brother is watching and he’s making you stupid" »

Remember the sound of a telephone ringing through a hallway?

The kind that attached to the wall and had a long, curly, plastic cord that could wrap around your arm but never quite stretch as far as the couch.

It was bulky too; heavy enough to need its own table or a hall-stand that doubled as a storage cabinet for the inevitable pile of White and Yellow Pages crammed underneath it.

Continue reading "The romance of a phone with a curly wurly cord" »

Am I missing something here? I don’t Twitter, tried Facebook for about a week and found intelligent and literate friends were writing banal crud.

I know, I know, I’m a dinosaur. What do you expect? I started out communicating mechanically using a cordless, battery-less typewriter.

I now have a bracelet made of old Remington or Royale typewriter keys.

Continue reading "Facebook: putting readers ahead of the words" »

Julia Gillard and Stephen Conroy have just released the full business plan for the National Broadband Network, saying taxpayers would get a 7 per cent return on their $27.5 billion investment, and it would take nine years for the network to reach 10 million Australian households.

The business plan foreshadowed wholesale prices of $24 per month for the basic 12 Mbps, and $38 for 100 Mbps. But neither Gillard, nor Conroy, would speculated on what a fair retail cost for consumers would be.

The Prime Minister would only say that with greater competition would come lower prices for householders. What would you be prepared to pay for the standard or ultra-fast fiber packages set to be rolled out over the next decade?

Email turns forty this year which makes it at least as old as Black Sabbath, Tina Fey, Andre Agassi, the floppy disk and the Post-it-Note but its reign as our mainstay of office communication could be over if Mark Zuckerberg gets his way.

At a press conference in San Francisco last night, the fresh faced Facebook CEO announced the launch of the company’s new messaging platform that while specifically described as “not email” evidently seeks to eradicate the need for it anyway.

Continue reading "What would you do to improve email?" »

I was catching up with a mate for a drink on Friday who I hadn’t seen in quite some time.

We’re good friends, we actually go way back, but there’s always been one aspect of his personality that drives me a little insane. Whenever I see him, he persistently quotes Eddie Murphy’s Delirious stand up show. 

He can’t stop.  It’s impossible.  If doctors were to examine him, I’m 74 per cent certain they’d uncover some sort of degenerative disease that prevents him from doing anything except quote Eddie Murphy.

Continue reading "The perils of staying on message" »

Apple released its newest incarnation of music management software last week, and unsurprisingly dubbed it ‘iTunes 10’. Flaunted amongst the new features is something called ‘Ping’, the ability to sign up and follow friends and strangers alike through iTunes, communicate your music tastes and discuss artists.

Apple claims it to be a way to ‘get to know your music by getting to know your friends’. After a cursory examination I went to Twitter and typed ‘WTF #Apple #iTunes #Ping’, laying out my initial superficial assessment bare for the world to see.

In centuries to come, ‘digital archaeologists’ may need a Rosetta Stone of some sorts to decipher what I said. Indeed, many of you reading this may wonder WTF I was tweeting about, so let me explain my standpoint in a way that 140 characters wouldn’t allow.

Continue reading "#isanybodyoutthereupfora realfacetofaceconversation" »

The expulsion of an Israeli diplomat this week took me back more than a quarter of a century, to the expulsion of the Soviet “diplomat” Valery Ivanov in 1983. Ivanov had been fingered as a KGB spy, and he was being thrown out for attempting to influence a senior A.L.P. figure, David Combe.

Surrounded by media at the airport, he gave a brief statement in Russian. As he turned to go, a voice rang out: “Could you say that again in Australian?”

Ivanov didn’t bother – he was gone. But the question stuck with me for one reason: it was the first time (though by no means the last) that I was to hear the language we speak referred to, not as English, nor as “Australian English”, but as “Australian”. 

Continue reading "Ostraya, a lucky winner of the linguistic lottery" »

When they hear that I don’t have a Facebook account or a Twitter page, some people look at me as if I’ve just announced that I want no part of some fundamental convention of society.

It’s the same reaction that I would get if I told them that I don’t own a pair of underpants or a toothbrush.

They look at me like I am some sort of commando-going, halitosis-suffering maniac who must be stopped for the sake of all mankind.

Continue reading "Surrendering to social media" »

We live in an era consumed by communication technology. Walk into any home, library or education institution and you are bound to find a young person tweeting, poking, emailing or texting a friend, rather than engaging in a face-to-face conversation.

We know from studies that most Australian teenagers use instant messaging at least once a day and that when given a choice, young people nominate the internet, not TV or their mobile phones, as the one piece of technology they could not live without.

Undoubtedly, there is immense value in young people possessing these new communication skills - but are they losing the ability to effectively communicate face-to-face in the process? 

Continue reading "Tweet all you like – but don’t forget how to talk" »