Sociable Communications

Contact: Rob claxton

Sociable Communications

Humans are inherently social animals and, we believe, exhibit a range of fundamental communication and social interaction behaviours that are largely independent of the technology of the day. It follows that if those behaviours can be properly identified and understood, it should be possible to design new communication services that better meet the underlying needs driving those behaviours.

Telephony, in its various guises, has been the dominant technology for conducting social interactions at a distance for much of the 20th century and remains an important tool. But the rise of alternative mechanisms from text messaging through to social networking proves that our basic, human, communication needs and requirements aren’t being fully met by traditional telephony services.

Our challenge is to re-invent BT’s communication services to embrace natural, human sociability. This means services that are designed to support known characteristics of human social networks (eg hierarchical relationship differentiation, network clustering, mean network size for an individual) and the underlying purpose of communications taking place over the network. We believe that significant progress will be made in this endeavour by striving for technology transparency, ie by designing “at a distance” communication services to mirror the equivalent face-to-face experience.

-- MaryLumkin - 21 May 2008