I have been pondering a bit more after I posted about the culture collisions reflected by the messy incident with phone call, sarcastic voice message, and the posting of the message on YouTube.

I had mentioned some things that adults, especially teachers, can do to adapt to the communications culture of younger people. Looking back, I had failed to mention things younger people can do to defuse some of the potential collisions.

• Keep in mind that people have different approaches to communications, including how and when they prefer to be contacted.
  
• Find out how other people, especially those who aren't your peers, prefer to be contacted. This includes times as well as phone numbers, email addresses, and such. Sometimes, it can help to ask something like, "how can I contact you if I have a question?"
  
• If some people don't want to be contacted at home, respect that. Their privacy boundaries may be quite different than yours.
  
• By the way, not everybody is as comfortable being "connected" as you and your friends are. Not everybody uses IM or text messaging. It doesn't mean they are snubbing you by not giving you an means to contact them electronically in real time.
  
• Even if it's extremely tempting, not everything benefits from being YouTubed or otherwise published. Yes, it can be fun and you can feel like you're getting even, but the posting can make it harder to solve the initial problem.
  
• If somebody's breakdown or rant is going to publicised, what goes along with the audio or video can help make a constructive point. Here's an example how a friend handled a hotel manager's "Otherwise, the next knock on the door will be the police terrorism squad" phone message. There's an audio, background info, and some contructive actions.
  
• Try to "hack" the human factors by learning & figuring out how the other people think. That can give insights on how to deal with them.
  

J.D. Abolins

Marc Fisher's piece "In Cyberspace, Everyone Can Hear You Scream" has some good observations about generation differences in communications styles. The report show the need for mutual efforts to bridge "the gulfs that separate digital kids from analog parents and new concepts of community from old notions of responsibility".

Fisher starts with an incident in Fairfax County, VA where high school senior Devraj Kori telephoned a county schools administrator's home to ask why the schools weren't closed during previous week's light snowfall. The administrator's wife, Candy Tistadt, returned Kori's call and left a message that called the students her husband serves "snotty-nosed little brats" and told Kori to "Get over it, kid, and go to school!" Mrs. Tistadt's sarcastic voice message was posted on YouTube. [See Note below] Quite a mess.

"We are the cellphone generation.... We are used to being reached at all times."
- Devraj Kori

"We all have a breaking point, but you can't break anymore without the rest of the world knowing about it.
-Julie Good"

As Marc Fisher noted in his piece nobody in the incident seems to think he or she is wrong; there are no good guys here. There is collision in the differing expectations of being "reachable" and of having privacy at home.

One Washington Post readers commented, Who has a home phone anymore?", a question with an obvious answer "nobody" for the "digital natives". It reflects the move toward telephones as devices to connect people, not locations. Along with the people connection, there is a growing expectation of being able to reach somebody and get a response immediately. The acceptance of ringing up somebody, getting no answer and trying later is disappearing.

I have a prediction, within a decade or less, some court or another will decided consider that not having a mobile communications device and being always reachable to be a lack of due diligence. The rationale will be that, by choosing not to avail oneself of a mobile and keeping it on, one has chosen to be incommunicado for important calls. E.g.; a parent not being able to receive a call from the school seeking consent for medical treatment for the parent's injured child.

While there are many people with this expectation of everybody being reachable, there are also many holding a more traditional view of having some distance. Mrs. Tistadt's voice message reflects that notion that one, especially a student, does not call a school administrator's home. Many people still prefer to be called at their workplace for matters concerning their job and reserve the home contact points for family, friends, and household matters. Breaching that boundary can be seen as a serious invasion of privacy. (Yes, I know, some would retort, "Get over it and go with the flow!")

Still, we a going to have a lot more of the technology culture variations in the future. Our lives will span many changes in technologies and cultural approaches to them. Today's digital natives are at the risk of "not getting it" a couple of decades from now. The blogs, IM, Facebook, MySpace, and that that will become old eventually and new things will come along. Personally, I find this diversity fascinating, but the tough part is to work out the frictions in communications.

Marc Fisher includes some advice to teachers from Julie Good, who runs a program at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, MD that trains students interested in being teachers. She agrees that the boundaries are shifting but notes that teachers who adapt with their students will usually be rewarded with civil and appropriate behaviour. This doesn't mean YouTube'ing videos of your student's awkward moments or such. She recommends giving students several options for contacting the teacher:

"I give my kids my cellphone, my office phone, my home phone, my three e-mails and my Facebook," she says. "This is a 24-7 job, and I've never had a problem with kids abusing it." As for the YouTube posting in the Fairfax case, "Hey, it's called freedom of speech," Good says, reminding me that "at this age, impulse control hasn't kicked in fully."

This is good advice. Provide acceptable means of communications in advance. There are other professions for which this is good advice.

Oh, yes. another word of advice: If you leave a voicemail message, remember you are being recorded -- that's the idea of voicemail -- and that recording can copied to other media.

J.D. Abolins

Note: There are now several version of the video, each with a different set of graphics. I was debating whether or not to link to one of these videos.The purpose of my posting on this topic is not take sides in the incident but to draw some lessons for all of us. So I am posting the link only to provide background information about the incident.

UPDATED 9 February 2008 to correct several typos I noticed after seeing this posting referenced and quoted by an E-Commerce Times article.

The Oregonian reports on an "old tech" lesson learned by Lake Oswego Junior High students when the school's computers were shut down for nearly four days. The systems had to be shutdown following a malware incident. Among other things, the students had to send "snail mail" home to their parents and many struggled with addressing the postal envelope:

Though proficient in e-mailing and text messaging, some of the eighth-graders wrote their address in the upper right-hand corner where the stamp goes. Others had the city first and the name last. A couple were unsure of their street address.

"It surprised me," said their teacher Aletia Cochran, who quickly taught them the ways of old-fashioned snail mail.

The article goes on to describes ways the teachers and students had to find alternative ways of doing things without the computers, Internet, electronic chalkboards and other visual equipment they use daily.

It is an interesting report. I often look at various activities dependent upon technology and think, "how would we carry on if the power went out?"

Resilience is a good thing. It is not only a matter of alternate technologies and tools; it is also a matter of skills and resourcefulness.

Many people my age and older may look at the story of the students struggling to address postal mail and lament the supposed "dumbing down" of the younger generations. This would be a big mistake. How many of us have the skills that our grandparent's or great grandparent's generations considered to be necessary? The sets of necessary skills change with time and, in the 20th Century, the pace of change increased. As new sets of skills are adopted, older ones may fall into disuse and not be learned by younger people. They don't have a need to learn them just as most of us don't need to learn how to handle a horse carriage.

The Oregonian article did have some good comments from Shelley Pasnik, director of the Center for Children & Technology. (The CCT has some interesting information on its Web site.) Among things she was, "Students might not know their phone number, but they know how to quickly access it... Kids have to negotiate a glut of information that is available to them." When reference tools are readily available, the need to memorise can be seen less vital. But knowing how to evaluate information from reference sources and how to use the information becomes more critical.

J.D. Abolins