Most of anything I've done has been performed virtually, but the medium of exchange has always been email where clarity is laid out in point form and short sentences. Please do a,b,c. Please note a,b,c. Please explain a,b,c. And it has worked well, for me at any rate.
But we have transitioned.
We now text business which amounts to punching in phrases and single words while distracted by all the other incoming and outgoing texts, by posting to Twitter or by checking share prices like a gambling addict.
I feel like an ape in the first stage of Darwin's climb to civilized communication - except that this may be the last stage before we fall off the cliff and back into great by the millionth degree grandpa's backyard.
The screens are so small and the construction of the visual message so linear and disjointed that anything longer than a grunt does not get read, not even scanned for meaning.
Participants create parallel realities in a flurry of thumbs and this process passes for doing business.
The result is confusion, inaccuracy, misplaced irritation or anger or some other negative emotion which simmers into explosion or facilitates a mute and hurt-filled split or disintegration of a contract.
Simply put, the job never gets done effectively, if at all.
The smartphone effect also works backwards. Subverted by the art of texting, people fail to grasp the meaning of connected sentences in emails, in reports and documentation, in books, on websites, in blogs and on group networking sites.
Responses are more a comedy of errors than a consolidation of project. Communication becomes personal, transformed from that which can be accomplished into a medley of personal demons, fantasies or agendas, and the breakdown leads to inertia and lost contracts.
Those who still care attempt to correct the confusion by hitting the dial pad and making that essential last desperate call, the final plea to re-float the sinking ship, only to reach voicemail.
When the contract goes sour the saddest consequence of the smartphone effect is that participants fail to understand why.
