I'm a firm believer in communication and human interaction. However, I'm also a firm believer that while the method of communication is important, is shouldn't dominate.

With this in mind, I've always found the idea of emerging technologies like smartphones, twitter, blogs, etc, to be distractions from communication rather than facilitating it. The high availability of digital communication has lead to a culture of availability, with the expectation and obligation to the technology. The "I want it now" mentality leads to instant communication without thought. (Anyone that's had me on their instant messaging client has experienced this - heh). It also leads to a lack of etiquette.

To put it another way: the increasing availability of intermediate communication technology leads to a decreasing signal to noise ratio.

As such, I've restricted my participation in using these distracting technologies to try and focus on interacting and communication on a more human level, attempting to maintain a higher signal to noise ratio.

But recently I've come to realise a few things: people were using these technologies to create a shared narrative. Their participation in the creation of that shared narrative was also contributing to their personal narrative; the noise in communication is important. It provides the 'brownian motion' required to keep people interested and excited. Without it, there's no basis for the creation of new dialogues (or 'signal'). All that will happen is the continuation of existing dialogues; I have stopped contributing to my personal narrative. I was merely a consumer of my experiences, not a producer of them.

It seems that in the search for less noise and more signal in communication, I'd ceased communicating effectively myself - the exact opposite of what I intended. In effect, I'd fallen behind while others went ahead and started communicating in a different way.

Time to reconsider.

I missed my mark when I dismissed such technologies as getting in the way of communication. I failed to realise that the way we communicate is changing over time. New communication technologies expand the communication universe, providing a medium for the propagation of signal and noise. With the selection of sources and filters, the individual can tailor the levels of signal and noise to their preferences. It also allows us to remove the bindings to any specific piece of technology, which allows us to put the focus back on the communication itself, not the method.

With this rapidly expanding communication universe, our old rules and guidelines for acceptable behaviour are inadequate. These need to evolve to provide a new set of guidelines to help govern acceptable behaviour in the new digital age.

So, maybe it's time for my communication universe to undergo it's next phase in it's evolution.

Or maybe I just saw that everyone else was on twitter and I felt left out. Yeah, that's probably it.