Top Shelf Technology: From Email to Video Call!

By Crivenica

So enough with the food and restaurants postings already, right? I love reading them and writing them, but goodness, these last few postings that my sister wrote made me drool and want to smack her at the same time because I can’t get that kind of cuisine here! So I think we need a break from food posting for a little while.

I’d like to talk about the technologies that make our world smaller by the day. They might not make the Earth shrink, but they sure make us feel closer to others around the world. I’m not going to talk about how social network technology helped what happened in Egypt & Tunisia, but it does show the power of communication technologies. It can help people to connect and assist anybody to be good citizens of the world.

Being a communication consultant, I tend to observe how people communicate with each other and I explore different channels to communicate with people. And boy, haven’t the ways we communicate evolved a whole lot in the past few years with the inventions of emails, instant messaging, VOIP and now video calls. Though some people consider the explosion of these communication technologies as a detriment face-to-face interactions, I personally think these technologies help me enhance my interactions with other human beings.

Sure, I get frustrated when I see people glued to their devices 24/7 or when people I have dinner with can’t seem to put their iPhones or BlackBerry away for more than a minute. That’s why we need to be smart about using our technologies. They are here to help us connect with people, not for us to become slaves to them.

Ever since David and I moved to Kathmandu, we’ve been using these technologies more and more. Thank goodness, even though we live in a less developed country, we somehow have better Internet connection than when we lived in Jakarta. And with this great Internet connection, we are able to video chat with our families weekly. Almost every weekend, I Skype with Louise in Chicago and our parents in Jakarta - and sometimes when the time difference allows, Annette joins in from Stavanger.

On Saturday mornings, David also tries to video Skype with his sister, Elise, her husband, Michael and our 3-year-old niece, Malia, in Eugene, Oregon. This is when video Skype is just awesome. We don’t get to see Malia very often and you know how fast kids grow, but by video Skype-ing with them, we can actually see how she is growing and she can know that she has an uncle David and an aunt Ri in Kathmandu. And with the new Skype, we now can do a group video call so when we Skype with Elise in Oregon, we can also include David’s other sister, Michelle, in New York and we all will be able to see each other on our computer screens. We haven’t actually done this, but I am so excited to try it. I am, in fact, going to inaugurate this service with my best friends, Shilla in Jakarta and Indri in Tokyo, this Saturday.

Aside from Skype, I am also a big IM user. Though I live far from family and friends, I still chat with them on Yahoo Messenger daily. Since my computer is on all day while I’m working on my novel, my YM is also on and friends or family can say hi to me whenever they want. In fact, before Skype even existed, I’ve always been on some type of IM. I remember when I was in college in Wisconsin, I started chatting with my cousin, Alex, on ICQ and he became the one cousin that I talk to the most. We still chat even today.

And lately since I got a BlackBerry, I become even more connected to my family in Indonesia. Everybody in Jakarta seems to have a BlackBerry and that includes my family members. The reason why I finally decided to get a BlackBerry is because the big Alam family has been very active on the family BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) group. The members of this group consist of my parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and my sister, Louise; all 20 of them. In this family group, we share anecdotes, family news, pictures and sometimes the conversation can get out of hand. It’s hilarious!

I came to love BBM because it’s another way for me to connect with people I love. Through BBM, I also got reconnected with my high school best friend who doesn’t use the computer much (so no Facebook or YM), but she uses BlackBerry and now we can chat. Another cool example happened last Monday morning as I watched the live-broadcast of The Academy Awards. Suddenly I got a BBM from my sister-in-law, Michelle, who was watching it in NYC, and we spent the whole broadcast exchanging comments on the stars’ dresses and how bad the hosting job was. We usually exchanged emails on our best-dress & worst-dress picks after the show, but this was a lot more fun!

Skype, IM, and BBM are fun, but I don’t stop there. I also use facebook and Twitter. I like that I can reconnect with friends from school and see how they are today as adults on facebook. And I like that I can read what’s going on in Indonesia through the tweets of my friends on Twitter. It makes me feel like I’m still a part of the loop even if I’m not there.

So for all of the reasons I wrote above, I celebrate the existence of IM, Skype, facebook and Twitter. However, don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe that my interactions with people through these technologies can replace the actual feel-good feelings I get when I interact with them face-to-face. Being with them in person is still the best. Hence, the technology that I hope they come up with next is the Star Trek Transporter machine, so when I need to go home and see my family, all I have to do is say, “Beam me up, Scotty!”