Wireless and the Essence of Being Human

So I was having a conversation with a client recently, and the subject of how to value (and promote) the concept and reality of mobile unified communications came up. Now, to me, this is the very future of enterprise communications systems, along with the integration of social networks as closed user groups. Think of a Facebook or MySpace kind of environment, but only open to authorized individuals, and supporting any kind of network-based communications. Such could replace e-mail, document sharing, conferencing, everything, with an environmental approach that is precisely, IMHO, what we need. Add in wireless handsets, eliminate desktop handsets (unless someone really wants one – it doesn’t really matter, but why spend the money on yet another phone?), and provide multi-mode communications with media conversion as appropriate, and that is, to me, anyway, perfect. The goal is to simplify and unify all of the modalities and vehicles we use to communicate with each other, boosting convenience, productivity, and event the bottom line.

And all of this is critical because the essence of what it means to be human is in communication. Some have said that what differentiates humans from other animals is our ability to make tools and apply technology (but consider how some primates use leaves to fish tasty ants out of tree limbs, and the wonder of a bird’s nest), and some have said it’s about our ability to deal in abstract thoughts (although there’s no real evidence that animals are incapable of this). I would therefore argue that the difference lies in our use of communication. Everything we’ve accomplished as a species has communication as its roots. And most of our failures as a species derive directly from, to quote Strother Martin’s wonderful character, The Captain, in Cool Hand Luke, failure to communicate.

Note that communication involves both sending and receiving. I marveled this summer at all of vitriol and venom in the so-called debate over healthcare here in the US. So if successful communication involves both transmission and reception, there was in this case way too much of the former and not very much at all of the latter. This was personally embarrassing for me, as I’ve spent most of my career working on and with communications systems of many forms, and over half of that career on wireless, the most marvelous vehicle communications modality ever. But all of this technology is for naught if we don’t have both ends of a given channel functional.

I wrote some years ago that there is no problem so great in human relationships that cannot be solved by the suitable application of communication. This was somewhat stolen from a t-shirt I saw about 30 years ago that proposed high explosives in this role. But that’s just it, isn’t it: if we talk, and listen, explosives of any form should never be necessary, except when building a new bridge or dam or some other objective of civil engineering. I am proud to work in a field that builds the channels and the vehicles, and works to improves the reliability, availability, and overall performance of the wonder of wireless. But I’m much more proud to be a member of a species that has the capacity not just for transmission, but also reception.