These days I make a living helping people avoid spending all night on processing their email overload, so it was with some amusement that I remembered how I used to spend my own nights communicating with people – but enjoying every minute of it!

This was back when I was in my teens and twenties, and I had a ham radio station I’d built myself (of course). I’d stay up late at night (when shortwave reception tends to improve) trying to connect to as many other radio amateurs in distant lands as I could raise in my earphones. It was a fun hobby, and it gave me much pleasure.

There are some analogies to email:

I was communicating across the globe; I made contact with many people I’d never met before; and, let’s face it, much of what we said (or pounded out in Morse code) was not very interesting per se: weather conditions, equipment and antenna configurations mostly – about as fascinating as much incoming email. And yet it was fun – an adjective no one would ascribe to email.

The difference, I guess, lies with the “warm fuzzy” factor. Email at its best can be very efficient, but tends to be dry, businesslike, and soulless. Sure, there are exceptions: some emails among friends and relatives can be heart warming indeed, but these are buried under the flood of utilitarian work email and useless unsolicited messages. The radio contact we had, even when done via dots and dashes, was a very human form of contact; it was synchronous, interactive, and for a few minutes would make two remote people feel friendship. I wish email was like that…

But then, the warm fuzzy factor does exist today – in the social networks world, notably the less business oriented ones like Facebook and MySpace. I encounter many people (above high school age, anyway) that express real concern with Facebook addiction and time drain, but even these would admit they find the experience pleasing: you see your friends, exchange comments and pleasantries, and feel part of a human activity, just like radio amateurs do.

But of course, none of these Facebook users could build a radio rig – or an internet router – from scratch…  🙂

Image courtesy Anthony Catalano, shared on flickr under CC license.