I have to admit, and I am little embarrassed, but I do watch Big Brother, and am fascinated about the dynamics of human interaction. One day it is all acting up for the cameras, forcing their personality into our living rooms, then they fight, then they are all best friends, then they are upset, miserable, happy – you get my point. But isn’t that life, human interaction and the emotions that sometimes you only appreciate when you can see the whites of the eyes of the person or people next to you?

It made me start to think about how we interact with our colleagues, suppliers, and customers is rapidly changing through the lightning pace of change in communications technology. I read the other day a journalist commenting on how communications is changing the way we all live and interact, he even dared to say that actually we wouldn’t necessarily even go to the pub for a social beer, but we would all be at the Cyberspace Inn saying ‘cheers’ online. Something’s can go too far.

Within the office environment, modern communications is changing the way we do business, being greener, reducing travel, reducing office overhead costs, instantly being able to find out if someone 300 miles away is available just by looking for the green jelly bean. Video conferencing is becoming more of a daily occurrence – I can see my web cam staring at me right now – (hope its switched off), and we are all becoming Max Headrooms of our generation. I have been marketing business communications for eight years, and the reason I like it so much is the ever changing pace and technology that has transformed from an essential piece of kit that sits on your desk, to a fundamental way businesses operate, and compete for customers, increasing their productivity and enhancing customer service, ensuring the security of their information, and making sure that businesses can continue through a disaster with a strategic Business Continuity plan. A small business can now operate and be perceived as a much larger corporate. We are all much more productive at work because of it, can you even imagine life without email, your mobile, or teleconferencing – doesn’t bare thinking about!

So getting back to Big Brother and the raw emotions from human interaction – communications technology will not slow down, and the way we interact at work will continue to be driven by efficiency and productivity, and I am all for it – it is absolutely fascinating – however one thing is for sure, there must be a limit, communication must take its place in all of our work / life balance – and as its Friday night, I am not going to log onto the Cyberspace Inn, I am going to the local to ‘interact’ with friends, family and a pint and witness those raw emotions first hand.

Its easy when you work in this industry when people talk about ‘communicating’ to automatically start thinking of IP Telephony, routers, Instant Messaging and eMail, but occasionally its worth remembering that ‘communicating’ is actually the way we interact with one another, and the meaning we convey, not the technology we use to do so.

So what started me thinking about this?

I am a heavy user of the Internet, and amongst other things, I participate quite heavily in an online discussion forum. Over the last few years I’ve observed some very interesting interactions between individuals.

Over the last few thousand years we’ve developed our natural language to be highly expressive, with words conveying very different meaning depending upon not ‘what is said’ but ‘how they are spoken’, and added to this body language to convey our true meaning.

And suddenly this isn’t enough.

As more and more of our ‘communicating’ happens electronically, these subtle extensions to the way we communicate no longer work. In response to this, we’ve developed a raft of techniques to cope, from the dreaded ‘smilie’ to a wide range of abbreviations such as IMHO and LOL.

So back to using a forum. Its interesting to have seen many many examples of sarcasm, humour and serious points being taken completely the wrong way because of the lack of expression or non verbal clues. Often this turns an interesting discussion into one that is confrontational, losing its original purpose. Those that also participate in a forum will recognize exactly what I am talking about.

However, for those that haven’t yet succumbed to living online, the same challenges exist. We are all e-mail users, probably most use instant messaging, and virtually all readers will send a fair few text messages. The next generation will have no such challenge. Their range of tools and techniques will have adapted, as they have developed their communications skills with these technologies, not tried to adapt to them. And the richness of the media used will bring back some of the clues for them anyway. It is this that will drive the inexorable progress towards high quality video calling, telephony across the Internet, and of course, a whole new language of IMHO, LOLs and BRBs.

So in the meantime, if you are over 16, be careful what you say. It might not be what is heard!