BARRIER CULTURE

Posted on | September 29, 2008 |

By Faith Popcorn - Futurist and Founder - Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve

We want to stay in touch with everyone, but we’re much too busy (”99 Lives” trend) to speak to people face-to-face, even when they’re sitting in the next cubicle. Our time is so precious that we are forced to prioritize the people in our lives. We set up a velvet rope, with only those we deem VIPs allowed access to us.

Counting Friends, the More the … MySpace
The VIPs at the top of the list are given the most intimate access - a cell phone or home phone number. Second-tier friends may be on our Twitter list, a third-tier friend is just one among the many MySpace friends. Our relationships now are about quantity (How many friends do you have on MySpace?), not quality, and about passivity, not engagement.

Over the years, thanks to technology, we have managed to save time by being selective as to who we communicate with and how we choose to communicate with them.

First came the answering machine. As callers, we could leave our message and be done -no need for idle chit-chat. As call recipients, we could screen our calls, deciding if the caller was worthy of our time. Out of this first machine has evolved the voice-mail on our home, work, and cell phones with advanced features to make our avoidance of communication even easier.

With email, we are able to send a quick message without having to interact with the recipient while remaining relatively anonymous in terms of voice and tone.

We have since moved on to more elaborate tools for communication that enable us to interact on our terms, when and how we want.

Return of Shorthand - as texting
Shorthand is back in the form of texting, because there’s just no time for vowels, punctuation, capital letters, and complete sentences.

The faceless, voiceless, passive communication of a person’s everyday activities is possible through Twitter and Radar.net, tools which push to any interested parties text (Twitter) and photos and videos (Radar) about what the sender is doing or thinking that day.

Instant Messaging is almost just like talking to someone face-to-face, minus the face-to-face element. Like texting, IM-ing saves time; we make contact, ask our question, get our answer, and we’re done.

The days of praying you’ll get someone’s voice-mail when you call them are over with Slydial, a voice message service that connects the caller directly to a person’s mobile voice-mail.

Acquaintances can be given the slip with the Vumber, a second number added to a cell phone. Calls to a Vumber may be answered or easily ignored. The Vumber is an effective tool for avoiding calls from websites that require phone numbers for registration.

Call Cheater inserts various background sounds, such as traffic, construction, garden or airport noises, during a phone conversation to help provide the caller with an alibi.

Talk to ME
Some people are choosing to remove the velvet rope.

Singles fed up with the coldness of Match.com and eHarmony.com are wearing their Talk To Me pins when they’re out at bars and clubs. The TTM message sends the signal that the wearer wants face-to-face communication.Â Likewise, the Facebook Refusenicks are opting for traditional means of communicating with their friends rather than interacting through a website.

About:

If you knew everything about tomorrow,. what would you do differently today? FAITH POPCORN’S BRAINRESERVE, a Strategic Trend Based Marketing Consultancy that tracks the 17 key trends that control our culture.