This is an article of mine that was published in Picnic Printed for the Picnic conference.
Most of us don’t really like fast food, but sometimes we just can’t help it. We’re hungry, in a hurry and we don’t really care about the quality of our food – we just want our stomachs filled, and we feel slightly guilty (and nauseous) afterwards. Still, most people do care about nutrition and appreciate the value of enjoying a well-prepared meal in the pleasant company of friends or relatives. If food can be about quality, intimacy, tradition and community instead of speed, efficiency, solitude and modernity – could communications technology be that, too? Could we invent ‘slow communication’, just like we’ve come to embrace the concept of ‘slow food’?
Sure we can – if Stefan Agamanoli has any say in it, anyway. And he has: he’s the Chief Executive and Research director of Scotland-based Distance Lab, a research facility which specializes in ‘slow’ forms of communication. His keynote at Picnic ’08 was entitled Dueling with distance, “because we’re usually fighting the disadvantages of bridging distances, instead of simply dealing with them”. Take the mobile phone, for instance: the same design philosophy that created fast food has created the mobile phone, Agamanoli says. (meer…)
