Imposing Your Imposition

Here’s what I’m getting to: I’m suggesting a window of opportunity for communication exchanges to establish and a second window to keep them active. Not a technologically-mandated window mind you, but a socially enacted one. Because the primary gripes and problems seem to stem from people competing for each other’s attention, here’s what I’m saying: First of all, use the methods offered by the technology itself to coordinate communication exchanges. Set status messages (note to self); leave voicemails; redirect calls and emails, etc. Secondly, I think a rough one minute or one and a half minute delay time in establishing communications is good enough. Think about a phone call: Most phones don’t ring for five minutes straight, waiting until the callee is ready to answer, they ring a few times and if it isn’t picked up, the communication is never established.

This applies to IM easily enough, if I send someone a message that says, “Yo what up” and I get no reply for a minute or two, it’s fair to say that the recipient is not ready, able or willing to engage me in conversation at the moment. Socially I should take that no worse than I would if I called and got no answer on a regular telephone. Sometimes people just aren’t available. No harm, no foul. But the same can be applied to in-person conversations where some party is otherwise engaged in a communication, such as when a person on their cell phone reaches the front of a check-out line. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the checker to wait for a minute or so and then ask the customer to step out of line until they can attend to their purchases.

The final step is to recognize the end of a communication session without necessarily having received a clear “All done” signal. The delay time there might be a little longer, but interrupted communications will probably be resumed at a later time so I’m actually inclined to say that the window there ought to be shorter. If someone becomes unresponsive for thirty seconds or so, disconnect the communication and re-establish it upon the unresponsive party’s return. Again, the biggest element should be the social acceptability of saying, “I got interrupted when talking to that person, but it’s not a personal affront to me, it’s just a fact of having to deal with interacting with people remotely.”

And of course one’s physical presence and surroundings should always take precedence.

Read Stuff. What Else are You Going to Do?

A couple of interesting things I happened across:

• Here are some screenshots of the Internet Explorer 7 beta. Wow, what a shock: They completely ripped off Firefox. You know what? I bet Firefox suffers for it, too. It’s a shame.
• A curious article describing why the current income tax system is doomed to fail.
• Looks like the new Intel-based Macs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Honestly, I kind of wish that IBM could have done what Apple was looking for with the Gx chips. Somehow having to re-code everything, run stuff in emulation (Rosetta) and all that hooey sounds like a big pain in the neck; plus as long as Macs contained a fairly unique chip I could say to myself, “This is why these machines cost so much more than a similar PC.” Now I have no idea why they’d cost as much except that Apple can get away with charging what they do. At any rate I certainly won’t be getting a MacBook Pro anytime soon despite the fact that I wanted a Powerbook up until last week. Not that it matters; I’m getting a new laptop from work today anyway which puts me over my maximum capacity for personal computers as it is.

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