Beyond Talk, Beyond Sound: Emotional Expression and the Future of Mobile Connectivity
Richard H. R. Harper, Steve E. Hodges · 2006
The chapters in this book are testament to the range of possibilities enabled by current communications technologies. Our own interest in this is reflected in ar-ticles and books that we have written that report on the use of various technolo-gies, whether it be SMS (Harper et al., 2005) or fully duplex mobile telephony (Brown et al., 2001). In this chapter, we want to take a different view: a view not on what communication technologies have done and do, but a view on what they might do when designed in novel ways. More particularly, in this chapter, we would like to explain why it is that, in the Socio-Digital Systems Group in Mi-crosoft Research in Cambridge, England, we have set up a programme of inquir-ies into what we are calling New Communications Genre. This is a long-term programme where we hope to invent and demonstrate the value of a variety of new ways of communicating, of expressing and being in touch. Background Why would we want to do this? After all, aren’t there too many communications channels already? Do we want to simply push more technologies on to people