Somebody sent me an email the other day, presumably the first of a series of email exchanges. She started off her email by saying she was “opening the portal of digital communication”.
I found this phrase to be very evocative and extremely pleasant. While name-checking the clearly digital nature of our conversation, her turn of phrase coyly pointed past the medium itself, to the deeper value at play: the desire to communicate.
I suspect that as our society transitions from SmartPhones to wearables, we will find ever more ways of “opening the portal of digital communication”. Yet no matter how advanced our technologies become, the underlying human imperative will not change.
That human imperative was beautifully described by E.M. Forster more than a century ago: Only connect.