Trump Changing How We Communicate

Banning laptops as airline cabin baggage will be a game-changer.

Predictions from commentators such as Mike Elgan of Computerworld, suggest that as terrorists perfect the art of laptop bombs, airlines will increasingly require them to be carried in the hold.

Don’t know about you, but my laptop and I are joined at the hip – there’s no way I’m trusting it to travel alone! Chances are that if your entire business is on your laptop, you feel the same way.

Choices then for mobile computing might be limited to either turning your cell phone into your computer (with perhaps hand-sized hard drive/stick options and/or plug-in Bluetooth keyboards), or a cloud-based method of carrying your laptop contents which you then access via, say, a rental laptop.

By forcing us to use our mobiles as computers, airlines will drive the development of new technologies that will once again alter how we communicate.

Currently, most of us use email as our preferred electronic messenger. It has drawbacks, of course, most notably that it’s not considered instant in the same sense that an IM implicitly requires an immediate reply. It is still, however, the most common and the most reliable. Also, everyone uses it. It allows us to communicate reasonably complex messages and include attachments. It is not as good as talking face-to-face, understandably, although we have adapted well to its everyday presence in our lives.

But emails sent from a phone are quite different from those emailed from a laptop. They’re shorter, for one, because of the extra time they take to type (unless your sender is able to thumb text at the speed of light). They also tend to be less formal and emoticons are used more.

It wasn’t long ago that I cautioned against using emoticons in emails. But I have changed my mind – not least because I use them myself when emailing from my phone. I do so less on my laptop, which indicates clearly how the device we use impacts our communication. Because I’m not a thumb texter, my by-phone emails tend to be shorter and I don’t add attachments. Yet. But I’m guessing it will only be a matter of time before I automatically save files to both my laptop and in the cloud so I can easily send them by phone. However, large files like photos don’t tend to send so well by phone and cost more so there’ll need to be changes before I’ll be willing to forgo laptop emails entirely.

The death of the laptop will also change the platforms we use to communicate. It has already begun with the advent of the POTUS-invented press-release-by-Twitter.

While we already have Facebook messaging, it doesn’t seem to be used for business yet. It’s not as reliable as email, either, in that messages are easy to miss, although you can attach files. But with the many changes Facebook is making to keep its platform relevant in the Pinterest and Instagram age, messaging may yet move into the business arena.

I think it highly likely that we will see the emergence of a new form of business interaction (if it hasn’t been invented already) that will turn your cell phone into a computer, complete with all your files, and that will be as common as email is today. 

We live in exciting times.