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Human behaviour does not change much from the primary school playground to the political round table. Bullying, name-calling and sending messages are behaviours common to both spheres. Some guys just do not grow up.

The day’s Auckland story about battling mayors jostling for position during the current supercity debate is tear-inducing. The fact that their text messages to each other, complete with spelling errors and name-calling, have been published shows that the sticks-and-stones of the playground are still there in these primal egos even as they battle it out in the political slayground.

The difference is that nowadays we can judge people from their communications. There are no secrets. Secret communications, those you make when you think no-one is looking or cares, become public data.

It seems right-wing Auckland mayor John Banks, who smiled at the gullible people of Auckland and got voted back in despite having been deposed some years before, pressed the wrong button and sent a text to his much-loathed rival, North Shore mayor Andrew Williams. The text referred to “this lunitic”. I imagine Banks in an angry shaking fit pressing buttons furiously, not heeding the spelling and groping through his list of contacts looking for his co-rightist pal Aaron Bhatnagar. File under ‘A’. By christian name. Very primary school.

Meanwhile texts from others in the debate, including would-be peacemaking Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey and soon-to-be-redundant ARC Chairman Mike Lee make them all look like a bunch of kids. Lee speaks of a group of powerful business men (who have overtones, vague non-altruistic ones, of philanthropy) invited (for politically expedient reasons known to Harvey) to a summit as “amateurs” and their thinking as “hair-brained”, although many of them are balding. Lee is erstwhile a sensible fellow, but texting, the lowest medium of them all, reduces everyone to the lowest common denominator.

We have netiquette online and there are pragmatic rules of politeness governing every other medium of personal communication. Many people have suffered from hastiness in sending an angry off-the-cuff email, including most politicos. It seems that the power of Telecoms has seen to it that there are no such rules for txting. It seems they, or someone whistleblower, are also willing to release txts to the media. The basic primal schoolkid instinct that characterises all people with a gadget in their hand emerges.

The media can now use emails, twit-twitterings, youtubings and facebook scribings as data in journalism. Now they have access to private txts from people in the public eye. We might at last be able to make political judgments based on these guys’ real behaviours and not the false rhetoric of public politics.

See this story here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10566362&pnum=2, and below is what they want us to see and who they really are.

Get Off the Phone

In the face of those in love only with the word ‘convenient’, I have a lifetime loathing of the ‘phone. Its ring shattering the silences of life forebodes something dreadful: a death, a bounced cheque, a dentist’s appointment, or, most likely of all, a spam call outsourced from India. I have a mobile number now, and use it for making and keeping appointments and checking up on how people are. I do not like to give out the number as it creates the illusion you are available 24/7. Businesses and tradespeople need to realise that when you are at work and with people you will not answer their beck and call. Besides, I do have a life. Let the more trivial stuff come in a text to be answered at will. There’s much controversy about people surfing the net on work time (and property). Soon will come surveillance of your mobile calls on work time (but your property).

Now I am in Australia and most people I know are in New Zealand. New Zealanders’ of our parents and other generations have been so traumatised by years of Telecom’s expensive monopoly that they still believe international calls will make them bankrupt. The phone remains silent, but I miss their communications. Few have signed up for Facebook or Skype, and if I get anyone there the communications are scattershot and minimalist. They are subject to our extremely erratic and slow internet and our static-tending phone lines. I am in an old area, and the copper wires are part of an unresconstructed infrastructure approximately contemporary with the Victorian Goldrushes.

At work our phone messages are turned into sound files and read on the computer. You might have no idea how sensible this is. If I’m at home, I can access phone messages left on a work phone. Phone messages lose that status of ‘I’m the most important thing in your life right now’ and become something that can be prioritised.

This is also why I’m trilled by the new google technology announced here: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25180584-15306,00.html – ‘Google turns voicemail into email’. Using the work of yet another company they took over, GrandCentral, they will be offering a service that provides a single number for home, work and mobile phones and turns voicemail into email. While I’d be happy just with the sound file on the computer, this technology goes further for text-philes (different, of course, from txt-philes) like me: it automatically transcribes voicemail messages into email and provides a transcript in a user’s email inbox. Everything is prone to the same vicissitudes of voice-activated protocols as the programme ‘Dragon’ is, so some transcriptions may be garbled. And outsourced, stress-timed spam calls from India will be unreadable.

As a way of simplifying communication into more of an ‘all in one’ model and as a time management system that gives the power to the called rather than the caller, it sounds worth looking out for. Especially if a company that isn’t such an all-consuming shark, eating all small companies in its repast, can get to put it out there too. And about those copper wires …

The Truth about Technology

It’s a global village. Communication brings us closer. We are all part of a community joined by technology. The world is getting smaller. We can all have many friends. There are even social networking sites for your dog (http://www.theage.com.au/national/how-social-networking-has-gone-to-the-dogs-20090207-80gc.html).

We communicate more. Yeah, right.

Since I’ve been in Melbourne, despite every technological device available to me, I feel less out of touch than ever, and received fewer communications, including fewer emails, the obvious mode of distance communication. The obvious conclusion is: yes, there is a psychological factor called distance. This is mostly because most immediate communications are made in an effort to set up a dinner or a lunch or a face-to-face tete-a-tete: not going to happen when the seas are wide, so you cannot get o’er. There are, indeed, still people who think a call from NZ to Aussie is going to cost megabucks: a generation still suffers from Telecom’s over-inflation. Currently, I have the following media in my arsenal apart from this blog:

• Three email addresses (home, work, back up with gmail)
• A facebook page (I’ve got, like, 6 friends, so I can’t use it like Obama can)
• A work webpage
• A Skype account and msn and yahoo messengers
• Home lines
• A mobile with an Aussie SIM card
• A Mont Blanc fountain pen
• Oh, and a home address. I did actually receive a letter in 2008. Thanks, Diana.

Where is the art of writing? Is it all gone to blog? It’s unlikely to go into emails, as most are short and to-the-point: just keeping in touch; here are my snaps. All lovely.  (To be true, I appreciate my several lovely stay-in-touch by e-mail friends. It is a bit lonely, so your detail is wonderful). Blogs are fine for detailing to one and all, my dear friends, those anecdotal and generalisable events and armchair philosophisings that take up a lot of normal converation space, but the feeling is that they are impersonal. So are emails that seem like newsletters. Even when I wrote detailed emails to friends they assumed they were newsletters. Sure, we may cut and paste a paragraph of general interest, but you are always the target audience. YOU.

There are some who txt me from nz. It seems a bit short-changing and perfunctory, to be sure, but it’s just staying in touch in a convenient idiom and medium. Sometimes even grave messages are communicated by text: “Am in hosptl …” In movies and even in reality (the girl in Taupo New Zealand) people try to txt for help before they are about to be _____(ed)(fill in nasty thing according to your imagination), but I think I’d be shaking too much and cursing the stupid stupid stupid inventor who makes ’s’ four pushes. Sometimes I think even txts may be copied or ’sent to many’. That’s fine too. We are busy. Nice to be remembered. But again, it is the feeling of the personal; that counts. But I’m sure that before now I’ve received a text intended for someone else. I’m sure that is another teen-slasher-movie plot! Maybe based on the Stephen King novel shown here.

Auckland and Melbourne are so close. Maximum 4 hours by air*. The two-hour time difference impacts on people’s psyche when it comes to phoning. That little calculation you do, ‘if it’s 7 pm here, it’s 5 there, they won’t be home from work yet’ means you’ve thought of it and it goes out of your mind. I do it too. The conclusion is usually ‘oh, it’ll be too late to ring politely now’. My Mum has a pact with me: 8pm Thursdays or Sundays, NZ time.

Mobiles are the biggest disappointment in the history of all media. Not only do they ring at all the wrong times and all the wrong places, but people actually now expect you be omni-available. Businesses, utilities, banks, hairdressers, friends. Hello, I work. I work with people. I’m in meetings. I’m in interviews. Hence, another medium of conversation is the phone message, which you respond to with another phone message because everyone’s in the same boat and all honest workers have them switched off during work time to avoid stealing company time. I mean, there’s such a lot in the news about people googling and facebooking on work computers in work time, but it’s the mobiling that eats so much more time that ought to be used for productive work. (I guess it’s just too controversial, given the Telecos are the real deputy rulers of the nations after the oil-corps). And when people do get through, they tend to drivel. This article in The Age is both amusing and mildly offensive in its satirical tone about what to do when someone invades your space with mobile drivel: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/turn-off-that-phone-the-real-scourge-of-public-transport-20090205-7yx3.html

*That dishonest way of advertising airfares (I thought Air NZ had been fined for doing it, but maybe they need more Pavovian conditioning than that) is definitely a disincentive to people who would visit, or fly. They click expecting the advertised seat for $199 one way, then after surrendering lots of data over an unstable Xtra connection (what other sort is there with Xtra?), find that airport taxes and random pay-outs total an extra $_ _ _ (enter three figures of choice; I know it’s happened to you). They end up not booking at all. Hello, morons in Marketing. Aren’t people being made redundant in your area? Come in, flight control!

Read me, and say something!