Institute For The Future

From efficiency to sociability

The earliest written records in the West-- the clay tablets left by the Babylonian and Sumerians-- are not poems or myths or laws. They're inventories. We think of writing as a medium for human communication and personal expression, but writing in the Near East is thought to have evolved from a system of tokens that merchants used to account for goods carried on caravans. What began as a tool for creating efficiency only later turned into a medium for sociability and creativity.

Fast forward a few thousand years, to the invention to the telephone and phonograph. Each was originally marketed as a tool for business. The telephone was a means to connect the front office and shop floor. The growth of corporate headquarters in the late 1800s had created a need for tools for managers to communicate quickly with now-distant production facilities. As a serious tool for business communication, the telephone was a high-end, expensive technology, not to be meddled with: according to nineteenth-century user manuals, it was to be used sparingly, for short calls. It went without saying that women were never to use it, since they'd just gossip.

Likewise, the phonograph began its life as a dictation machine. Busy, time-crunched managers would be able to record memos on wax cylinders, which could be passed on to clerks and secretaries and typed, or of private notes, which could be easily stored. It took a couple decades before music publishers realized that the phonograph could be used to record and play music.

Writing, telephony, and the phonograph are very different technologies, but they illustrate an important point about communications technologies.

Throughout history, communications technologies often start out being used to increase efficiency, but users reinvent them as media for sociability-- for connecting to other people. As primates, we have a built-in drive to connect to other people: we're Homo sapiens first and Homo economicus after, even if the history of technology sometimes suggests otherwise.

Of course, efficiency and sociability aren't polar opposites. Efficiency can be enable sociability, by making a device easier to use or an interface simpler. We've all had the experience of having technologies sometimes get in the way of communication-- think of bad phone connections, or devices that distract you from the person you're talking to. But in these cases, efficiency is a means to a new end, not an end in itself.

This pattern of more efficient designs helping trigger a technology's move from efficiency to sociability is something we've seen repeatedly in the last twenty years. It happened with the cell phone, which shifted from an emblem of high-powered businessmen (remember Michael Douglas wielding a shoebox-sized one on the beach in Wall Street?), to a pocket-sized accessory for teenagers. The personal computer's primary raison d'etre used to be its utility for managing household finances or writing papers; it hasn't shed those functions, but for many users, e-mail and instant messaging are the first uses of computers that come to find.

Are there technologies currently used in efficiency contexts that are likely to be reinvented as sociability tools in the future? Definitely. MEMS sensors, which currently are used mainly in high-stress applications like airbag accelerometers, are starting to be used to enable tangible interfaces, in which users gesture or move to control a device or initiate an action. RFID, which thanks to Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense is today's Hot Disruptive Technology, is already starting to appear in toys and games.

One thing that's new about these and other cases, though, is that they really enable two kinds of sociability: sociability between people (which is what the telephone and writing were about); and sociability between devices. Books don't talk to each other, except metaphorically; but devices with embedded intelligence and sensory capability can, and will.