mind the gap

Today I was struck by how much of a gap there is between two parts of my family and (local) friends. It's almost a generational gap, but not really. It makes it hard for half of us to communicate much with the other half, except for a few individuals who grudgingly span the gap. It's the division between phone users and email users.

On the one side are mostly the older folks, but enough younger ones too, who use the phone without qualms, but see email as a chore that should be put off. Or who, horrors, don't have email. On the other side are those like me and Anna who'd rather go to the dentist than use a phone, and who either enjoy email or at least appreciate that it lets us respond asynchronously.

In my circles whole little forwarding networks have sprung up to deal with this. Luckily we don't seem to have any people who prefer to only use instant messanging/IRC, although I hear that a few degrees from me there are some. So the current routing for a given message is pretty easy to figure out -- it's never more than two hops to anyone.

It's nice that I can receive voicemail via email now: This has actually resulted in me keeping up with my voicemail, and it means that I myself have begun to do some bridging, but only in one direction. It's of limited use though, since I think neither side likes leaving voice mail much. It will be interesting to see what technology, if anything, bridges this gap in the future..