The joke's on us

On these recent summer nights, our household has been arranging itself as follows: Noel and I in the living room, watching TV, working, knitting, and/or reading; Cady Gray in Archer's room, watching Twitch, playing Steam, chatting with friends online, drawing, roleplaying; and Archer in the front room, keeping up with his various YouTube-based "camps." Every once in awhile Archer will pop up from the couch and go running into his room to tell CG something, or come into the living room to tell us something -- he's had a thought about how Ten Words of Wisdom is working out, or has just learned an amusing fact on Numberphile.

Last night he jumped up, hustled down the hallway, burst into his room and said "Hello!" Except CG wasn't in his room. She was in the living room with us, talking about Romeo And/Or Juliet. All three of us watched and listened, bemused, as he ran past and shouted "Hello!" to an empty room. Then we burst into laughter.

Archer came in and stood in the doorway, smiling uncontrollably. We were laughing at his mistake, at something he had done that turned out to be funny. But -- and here's the important thing -- he wasn't angry or frustrated with us, or even embarrassed about the mistake. He was enjoying the fact that we found it amusing, because he found it amusing too. He grinned and commented happily on the error, recognizing that his assumption had gone hilariously awry. He knew we weren't laughing at him, even though, y'know, we were laughing at what he did. He was having as much fun as we were.

I looked at that smile and thought how remarkable it was. For a boy who had to consciously practice being aware of how others saw him, putting himself in their shoes, and tailoring his actions accordingly, it represented how very far he's come.

And those YouTube camps he watches hours upon end? They're part of it. He emulates the YouTubers who play gamemaster to their subscribers, creating "object shows" where cartoon icons like Golf Ball and Cat Bed compete in Survivor-like competitions, earning points and being eliminated. These channels don't just entertain him passively; he learns from them (and from the feedback they incorporate into the ongoing game) how to manage interactions. His earliest efforts were based on popular marble-race videos made using the software physics engine Algodoo, combined with animated Wacky Races-style cartoons like Battle for Dream Island. But at the same time as his Keynote animation skills develop, so do his interactive instincts, all propelled by his simultaneous interests in designing a good game and keeping his subscribers happy.

Just look at what's going on in his most recent camp, Battle for Regal Planet (here's a video from 10 months ago, and here's one from last week after an Undertale-inspired design reboot). He's even started narrating his TWOW-homage Realm of Fifty Characters, just like his hero carykh. Listen to how smooth and expressive that narration is. He writes it all out, but it's full of dramatic twists. He's clearly aware of his listeners and pitches his presentation to their expectations, needs, and entertainment.

Years ago as we were trying to imagine our #robotboy's future, I hoped that computer interaction, with its throttled stream of cues and information, would allow him to make progress in socialization. Today I'm amazed at how that has happened, in realms I never could have foreseen.

On beyond e-mail

For those of us over forty, electronic mail has revolutionized our lives. We communicate more frequently, and with more clarity and accountability, than when paper or the telephone served as our primary media. Items to be read and acted upon wait patiently in inbox, yet remain accessible from almost any remote location. If we've been smart enough to move to an e-mail platform that keeps conversations together in one message stream (like Gmail) and has no attachment size limit (like Gmail), and is robustly searchable (like Gmail), then we use our e-mail account as our external brain -- it keeps track of what we decided and who we contacted and what information we shared, and it never forgets.

But it's always the case that when we adopt a tool, even one as powerful as e-mail, we become aware of its limitations. E-mail is good for broadcasting information to a group of people, but it's not good for conducting conversations among more than two people. Some are responding to earlier messages after the conversation has moved on, because their e-mail client (unlike Gmail) lists all the messages separately, and they tend to start with the oldest one and deal with them in order. Some forget to hit "reply all" and end up starting a side conversation without meaning to, then not understanding why their contribution wasn't heard by everyone (or the opposite -- they meant (or should have intended) to start a side conversation, but mistakenly (or unwisely) sent their reply to the whole group). Documents to be read and annotated, when sent by e-mail, cannot have the annotations easily collected -- the e-mail exchange ends up with multiple attached documents, all different, that someone will have to compare and sort out. Sending large documents to an e-mail list typically runs into server limitations at somebody's end, necessitating breaking apart the attachments into smaller chunks and resending (creating the potential for version confusion). And not everyone is in the practice of saving e-mail indefinitely; almost certainly for some participants the record of decisions reached, information shared, issues raised gets destroyed (or becomes difficult to find) within a relatively short period of time.

Yet all these shortcomings of e-mail represent kinds of communication that organizations need to conduct all the time. No single tool solves all of them and delivers the universality of e-mail. So we decide to live with the limitations in order to avoid asking people to learn and utilize new tools -- online workspaces, document libraries, wikis, bulletin boards.

For people of a certain age -- mine -- we feel powerfully modern asking, "could you e-mail that to me?" (or worse, "Can you e-mail that to everyone in the group?"). But it's frequently the case that our 1993 suggestion is actually a bad idea in this twenty-first-century world, where there are betters tools to address the particular communication need (i.e., "Can you share that Google document with me?", "Can you start a thread about that in our Yahoo! group?", "Can you post that on the wiki?"). Yes, these changes require the flexibility to learn new processes, something in shorter and shorter supply as we age. But why should my personal limitations be the determiner of how my organization does business?

A like-minded colleague and I have spent most of the meeting discussing effective communication (and planning to take the discussion to the next level by working on a project and grant to showcase its pedagogical implications). Here are some of the features of effective organizational communication I've gleaned from this weekend's work:

1. Effective communication is distributed. Various persons empowered with leadership and participation roles in the organization need to be given appropriate levels of ability to initiate and carry out communication directly, without passing through an administrative, staff, or technological bottleneck.
2. Effective communication is structured. Brainstorming space/time is needed, but not all space is brainstorming space/time. Structure sends us important messages about the goal of the communication, and about the nature of the process that will achieve that goal.
3. Effective communication is targeted. Not all information is needed by everyone. The more information that is relevant to me is cluttered by or buried under irrelevant information, the less likely it is that I'll absorb and be able to act on the relevant information.
4. Effective communication is cross-referenced. Links lead to complete previous discussions or decisions, which are pithily summarized in the present communication. Links lead to background information or possible models for action, which are pithily summarized in the present communication.
5. Effective communication is archived. The previous discussions, decisions, versions, etc., must be available to be referenced.
6. Effective communication is efficient. Time spent reiterating, resending, getting the new participants up to speed, going off-topic, etc., is time that is not available for doing productive work.