Could we use programs to help fill in the gaps of human interaction that take place on line? Communication Surrogates.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts human communication can be complex. It isn’t just the words used, but also body language, the inflection and tone of voice, and where someone focuses when they talk. When you tell someone to, “look me in the eye and say that,” you are searching for confirmation and reassurance. If you’re on the phone talking to someone and you hear them typing away on the computer, do you feel that you have their attention? What if they’re actually listening intently and taking copious notes? The point is that online and over distances there are certain limits on natural human interaction and communication. One way that we have tried to overcome this over the years is through the use of Communication Surrogates. Now I’m sure someone else has already come up with this term, but since I’ve never come across it before I’m going to take the opportunity to give it my own definition.

Communication Surrogate: Any technology or convention intended to communicate emotion or thought; whether intentional or otherwise.

So what are some existing or current Communication Surrogates?

As we work in more distributed environments and with other individuals across distances, human interaction and communication online seems to be traveling down a few interesting, yet different paths. One is focused on bringing personal interaction online. Whether it’s as simple as a video chat, or a more complex form of altered reality, this is about showing the non verbal communication and interaction that takes place in person. Hospitals have done experiments with robots that cary monitors displaying your doctors face, while he might be miles away, or otherwise engaged. The doctor has a control system that allows him to navigate the robot and even to perform some limited long distance interactions with patients and staff.

On the other end of the spectrum is the emoticon. what used to be a quick series of ascii characters that symbolized a smily dace or a wink in text have now become a long list actual graphics that can be embedded into email or online chats. In the movie “Moon” an artificial intelligence uses emoticons on a computer screen to indicate the emotion that the voical program cannot convey.

it can become very challenging to maintain effective communication with teams that are distributed geographically. Are Communication Surrogates a viable supplement to teams in order to help span distances?

Proposition: Can a Communication Surrogates be programmed to evaluate the content of emails (threads included), chats, tweets or other electronic communications, in order to assign a value to the conversation. The Surrogate would monitor the users trends, as well as being trainable. (I won’t get into forward and back propagation systems here.) When you popped into an email chain or chat room you would immediately see a personal indicator to help provide a frame of reference to you. It could be a simple color scale, and the metric might be based on anything from the projected interest level to you, to the emotional volatility of the content and participants involved. Perhaps the indicator might be more complex indicating multiples of these metrics.

Could these Surrogates eventually be intelligent enough to provide information to others in our stead? Imagine if you are writing an email to three people and as you type their Surrogates displayed an indication of how they might react. Honestly I think there’s a long way to go before I would personally trust such an indicator, but it is an intriguing idea.

I find the concept of Communication Surrogates fascinating. How doe we cut through the clutter of the day to day to get to what matters? How do we more effectively communicate to others our true intent and feelings in an electronic medium? Can we eventually reach a state where communicating remotely is truly as effective (or more so) than communicating in person?