The duality of being able to communicate anywhere and anytime....

"As far as I can tell, devices meant to save you time and help you communicate actually take away time and give you an excuse to not to communicate. People like e-mail because they don't have to answer it. I don't even own a computer".

Enlightening owner of that quote....

This got me thinking: do we communicate more or less than we did just a mere decade ago? And what's happened to the depth and quality of our communications? How many many meaningful conversations do you have daily?

I believe volumewise, we're in the stratosphere in terms of communications and it's only a matter of time before someone figures out the ultimate anti-gravity equation for communications and we can warp beyond our puny limit of daily hundreds of e-mails, voicemails and junkmails. Call me a cynic 'cuz I live in the corporate world - sometimes it seems like half my day is either spent deleting e-mail or generating e-mail which will be deleted as soon as possible by someone else. This must be the Devil's version of the to-do list. How many times do you let e-mail sit there before answering, or not? How many calls do you allow to go to voice-mail?

At the same time - thanks to the Internet in particular, we make way more (often fleeting) connections than we used to or could ever think to. Are you interested in talking about a kite-swaying-cat-loving-vege-hating-post-feminist-neoconservative-environmentally challenged world? Well - there's likely more than one someone out there that you can connect with. And that's magic.

In short:

Volume - up
Connectivity/Range of Communication options - up
Standard Deviation of the Distance of the People We're connecting with - up
Quality of communications - don't know
People yearning for a shared connection - still there