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Devil's Advocate: The train makes the connection
"Surely our problem is not the opportunity to communicate more and more, it is the difficulty of spending enough time thinking about things before communicating rather less."

By Martin Brampton

Published: Tuesday 19 August 2003

GNER has recently announced it will be among the first operators to offer passengers Wi-Fi access. Martin Brampton questions whether that's such a good thing...

The railway system can no longer cope with trains making connections. With so many operating companies, and a complex system of fines for late trains, it seems to be impossible for a train to wait for a few moments so that passengers can connect from one service to another. But GNER thinks it can gain passengers by making wireless connections in its trains instead.

There is a well-established correlation between journey time on the train and passengers shifting from airlines to trains. GNER evidently hopes that this can be countered by encouraging people to settle down on the train with their laptops and handhelds. Then the train’s Wi-Fi system connects them to the internet and their email. Hopefully it will be unaffected by leaves on the line or the wrong sort of snow.

It will be interesting to see the consequences. It was always thought that universal availability of the network would push computing off the local device. Ideally, provision of connectivity by GNER and others will create a situation where it is no longer necessary to struggle with bulky, heavy laptops. But as they are providing only the network, and not any kind of terminal, the user will still have to carry something.

I wonder, though, why people think it is so important to remain constantly linked to their emails. It is not just GNER’s hopes that demonstrate this characteristic. Users of corporate networks evidently become jumpy very quickly if email is switched off. Paradoxically, nearly everybody complains that they are receiving too much email.

Now, I have to wonder how genuine is this complaint. Is the constant sending and receiving of emails really a way to be efficient or merely a way to keep busy while achieving rather little? Perhaps we would do better to ignore a lot of the emails that are sent, especially those where one is not the main recipient.

This could easily be achieved. Why not set your email software to automatically reply to every message, saying that you have not read it and wonder if you really need to? In the automatic reply, you could offer an alternative email address for mail that is really important. Of course, people would soon start writing to the alternative email address but changing it regularly solves that problem.

This approach imposes some extra work on the sender but since emails are commonly retained in a 'Sent Items' box the effort of resending is very small. This technique should work very well with spam. It might have the drawback of confirming the existence of your mail box but then most spammers seem not to prune their mailing lists anyway. The automatic reply could further discourage spam by announcing that there is no need to resend financial proposals, offers of penis enlargement and so on.

With techniques like this, GNER’s service could become redundant. I always used to take the view that it is one of the great virtues of train journeys that the outside world is completely shut out. Especially when travelling in darkness, it was almost like being on another planet. The world as we know it could have come to an end but travellers would not have known until they disembarked.

Of course, that is an illusion, but I still find it rather appealing. Surely our problem is not the opportunity to communicate more and more, it is the difficulty of spending enough time thinking about things before communicating rather less. My idea of an enjoyable journey includes the possibility of reflecting on whatever is interesting me at the time, freed from constant interruptions and distractions.

Perhaps GNER has yet another marketing campaign up its sleeve. After it has persuaded lots of people to board trains armed with laptops and bursting with ideas for emails, then it will be able to offer an alternative premium service – the chance to travel while temporarily disconnected from the rest of humanity.

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk.

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