When I'm not being a digital media student, I spend my time in the confines of my office in Denver. The culture of my office is the product of hyper-connectivity: email, landlines, cell phones, intercoms, memos, snail mail, face to face meetings, etc., etc... Here is the irony: I find that despite all of the mechanisms that exist to facilitate communication, it is just these devices that often contribute to communication's disintegration. Everyone in my office sits in their individual offices the majority of the day, staring at their computer screens. It's almost as if their eyes become the screen, their hands become the keyboard and the mouse, their ears become the telephone... More often than not, email is the preferred method of communication. Sometimes, even when we're in the same building, we send emails to each other, rather than walk down the hallway to have an in-person interaction. Often, multiple recipients are "carbon copied" to our emails, making the exchange less personal, and sometimes, communication is redundant, messy, and misunderstandings or confusion ensue. At times, it evokes what Ms. Blackwell from TED Talks describes as "temes" or technological memes that have a life and will of their own, acting like parasites in humans and their communication processes.
I surveyed my co-workers to see, on average, how many different interactions they have at work in one day (emails, phone conversations, etc.) I created a word cloud based on the number of different types of interactions they had on an average day, making each word proportional to the number of times its corresponding communication was used. Unsurprisingly, emails dwarfs all other forms of communication. Intercom communication comes in second despite the fact that people in my office are able to speak face to face if they so desire. Snail mail is barely legible because it is used so infrequently, thus antiquating the paper communication trail.
It makes me wonder to what extent should we sacrifice face to face interactions in the name of expediency and convenience. In my experience, often a living breathing, in-person interaction can transmit more information in real time and conveys what can be lost in purely technological interaction: emotion, intonation, depth... This map is a reflection of my office's hyper-connectivity and how communicative prostheses are replacing human interaction.
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