Mobile Ministry Magazine (MMM)

Some days ago, that day with the conversations, one of the more beautiful points of reflection was pointed this direction:

(paraphrased) When you only know someone over a virtual line (web, phone, etc.), there’s a tendency to create a perception of that person which may or may not closely align itself to reality. This imaginative view gets called into question when those virtual lines are broached in a face-to-face or real-time meeting. Many times, the relationships cannot stand up to the truth of the real person versus the imagination. The challenge in these times, especially in the context of faith and technology, is how to cultivate genuine relational events virtually, while minimizing the impact of our imaginations to create a view of a person or group that’s just not realistic.

To that point, I’ve found the recent conversations around the shutting down of Google Wave to be interesting, and at best revealing.

Google Wave was developed as a different look at modern communications. It asked the question “what would email look like if it were invented today?” OF course, we don’t think too deeply of such a question because of how much email has ingrained itself into our modern lives. And certainly, we see the effects of email in everything from MMS to IM to RSS. It’s held belief (by some) that trying to reinvent email, or the behaviors and contexts around email, is too great to surmount.

We can remark that Google Wave almost seemed destined to fail. It acted like an email inbox on caffinated search, positioned itself as a real-time collaborative wiki engine, had very raw abilities to be customized to users, alert schemes, and workflows, and had a unique ability to be louder than many blogs would like to be. Also, browser requirements, and an unfamiliar back-end made getting up to speed very difficult (mobile or otherwise). In effect, Google Wave reached very far outside of the behaviors and silos that we are used to, asked a different question, and proposed what communication/documents could look like if done differently.

The answer has been pretty clear for but a few unique usages. Google Wave tried to be too many things all at once, and never made itself distinctive enough to some of the core communication issues that still plague most of us inside of email, IM, wikis, and blogging contexts – namely that none of our information connects seamlessly enough given the abilities that our devices, federated services, or social entries do currently espouse. In looking at communication silos differently, Google Wave reached towards asking people to change their perspective on how they use and consume information. And was unsuccessful in getting enough users or specific niches to adjust that viewpoint.

The reality didn’t match the imagination that was sparked when it was announced.

Before Wave could be used by anyone, it went through a long courting process – first some developers, then a series of groups of 1000, and then everyone. During this time bugs were addressed, use cases were explored, and in general, people began asking the question, “what is Wave for?” The last question made it clear, that despite the glamor of discovery and exploration, people still needed a relevant point to stick to in order to see the benefit(s) of Wave.

There’s one side of technical adoption and cultural change which says that “technology is only relevant when it is personal.” And this is certainly true on the side of those creating and marketing these tools. The other side of this is that any innovation worth creating will always cause people to ask themselves personally if they want to see life differently. To create something is by nature an attempt to say that there’s something different here that should be considered. If done right, whether that invention was accepted or not, relevancy and maturity changes the relation of that person to the technology.

So back to this point about perspective and imagination. The communication layers that were primary to communication in relationships have changed significantly in the past 15 years (speaking on a global and socially mainstream level). Mobile devices, websites, social graphs, location-based services, etc., have added to the layers that we’ve traditionally used (phone calls, postcards, hobby groups, etc.). And in some cases, these more digital layers have completely displaced the analog ones that we might have grown up with. Even more to the point, current generations of communities never knew analog communication tools and behaviors, and therefore will only have a digital frame of reference. It’s enough to imagine that communication between groups is profoundly different and can never be reconciled to something more true.

With Wave, Google took on the perspective that its possible that we are missing the benefits of our interactions with one another because of the nature of our communication tools, and the behaviors that we’ve created around them (and even in shutting down Wave there was a parting shot towards technical understanding and advancement). They choose to take an alternate view, and try to convince others that its profitable to them to also see life in a different light. Unfortunately, the different light didn’t look as pleasant as the imagination. And so the service was shut down, with the lessons learned propagated into other Google products.

In these times, imagination will cause us to take steps (of faith) that might not work out. We’d be wrong though to not take on those opportunities towards looking at life differently. For while it may very well be that we’d fail at trying to convince others, the lessons we’d learn would have impact in other areas of our lives (and possibly even the lives of others), creating the grounds for a second kind of wave – the one where genuine relationships walk alongside the technology, and create the winds for a new batch of imaginations and applications.