Communication – for People
I like it when things work as they are intended. We rencently set up a Content Management System for a local church. Their system will allow them to have multiple people with access to make changes to their site. We then setup an email address that will forward any emails to it to all the editors’ personal email addresses (small mailing list). So on the web site there is one point of contact, but that goes to all those involved. Whoever decides first to respond to that contact, can then again email all the editors so that there will not be two people doing the same task.
So, I like it when systems work like this. When computers work in the background the facilitate communication. The computer gets used as a tool.
But notice that there are still people involved. The tool cannot do the job on its own. In our highly technical society, I think this is important to remember. People are integral for communication to be meaningful. A computer, a process, even words, only have the meaning given to them by people.
So use computers as tool to aid in communication, but make sure that communication is meaningful to others!