Too Many Channels

Most GG’s age remember a time when there were three TV networks and maybe one or two local stations. From these folks you might hear “thousands of channels and nothing to watch”! Well, it isn’t just TV where this is true…and in this other case it maybe is more damaging. GG speaks of social media.

First, though, let’s expand on the term to include many collaborative environments because they work, in the end, very much like small social networks.

Recall in the early 19th century you had two means of communication: oral face-to-face and writing a letter. (A book is really just a lot of letters strung together). By 1960 we were up to phone calls and, if you really needed written urgency, telegrams. (Or FTD, if you wanted to say it with flowers). Since about 1993, options have mushroomed.

So GG was talking with a group of geoscientists lamenting that they weren’t sure how to best inform colleagues of their group’s activities. They were old-school enough to be contemplating email flavors or a society’s connected community site or a newsletter or a web page. So we’re talking pretty old school here, and yet the choices can be difficult. Pick poorly and you don’t get the message across, so not an empty decision.

But it can get worse as generations cross. Instagram and Twitter/X might work better than, say, FaceBook or LinkedIn, or some might want Slack or Discord or Mastodon or a Reddit thread or even a lowly blog. Any new collaboration or membership demands a new communication tool. Open a computer and exclaim “Too many choices! Which channels have something I need to see on them?”

Of course the problem is that there are differences between these tools, and so we face some folks wanting this tool for this reason and others that tool for that reason. So this isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. But we may need a means of coping with this. There are hints of awareness in the social media development community (the interoperability of Mastodon would allow conversations from one server/interface talk to others, much as a phone call from L.A. to Boston might involved three phone companies but worked the same as calling a neighbor). But there have been hints before that went nowhere (think of Bill Gates’s crusade for “Write once, deploy everywhere” for …. Basic!).

You can almost bet that if somebody makes the equivalent of a smart interchange for all these that some media will try to break it as exclusivity is where they gain an edge. You almost wonder if, one day, the government will step in and say “Enough”.

That lone should get the powers of Silicon Valley working on this post haste…