With cell phones, there is an unspoken assumption that we have our phones with us at all times and will be able to answer them. People get frustrated when calls are unanswered or missed. I find that I enjoy turning my cell phone off or leaving it at home…until I miss an important call from a potential employer. This is a problem with this kind of technology. What can we do when we only want to get important calls or only social calls? Call screening is a popular way to use discretion, but then the caller gets frustrated. Last night I missed several calls when I was in a film screening for a class and the call certainly disturbed me as well as those near me. I would have liked to inform the callers that I could talk in an hour or so. Then, I got similar calls when I was finishing up a project that was due in a half an hour. This time, I decided to answer so I could explain that I would call back later, but this time took away from my work.
These issues with availability could be ameliorated by using a kind of away message to inform your contacts when you can or cannot talk. This would help the receiver because they would be less likely to be disturbed when they did not want to be bothered and it would also help the caller to decide when to call you. Another way of doing this would be to have a status feature that would display a green icon if you are available, a red icon for when you cannot be disturbed, and a yellow icon for urgent calls only. Another similar feature would be an icon deciding what kind of calls to take, like work calls only, or social calls only, etc. that would show up on other people’s phones.
None of these rigid design concepts fully incorporate the fluidity of social reality. While it might be convenient in a meeting to have a red status up, you might forget to change it when you get out. Or if you just got out of class and change your status to green, but then you bump into a professor, you might immediately not want calls again. This instantaneous switching of availability is a social concept that relates to Ackerman’s discussion of roles. In reality, we all occupy many different roles to different people in different setting and we move between these easily and quickly, so it would be crucial to make a status for your phone encompass this ambiguity. Maybe being able to hit a button on the outside of the phone to change our status might be quick enough and ambiguous enough to satisfy our “real life statuses”. The problem that is unsolved, however, is that there are gray areas in real life between statuses, whereas a technological update would have to be binary--either on or off.
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I am one of those people that gets very frustrated when people are unreachable, especially now that we expect people to be responsive through so many different communication channels. I often tell people that they are irresponsible cell phone users when they go days with a dead battery, or leave their phone in their other pair of pants. I like the idea of a status feature; if there was a way for the phone to use your calendar or the phone’s calling profile to automatically set the status it would remove the extra burden on the user for constantly changing statuses. I agree with you that this is not a perfect system and some times we would like to receive calls from just one or two particular people and no one else. It would be interesting to see if we could use the technology to implement some of the gray areas such as letting a randomly selected half of your calls through when you are transitioning between busy and available.
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