Listen to what I mean, not what I say!

Many years ago, my wife Jennifer was explaining something to me and she accidentally used the wrong word to describe a concept. I knew what she was trying to say, yet I couldn’t resist suggesting the word that she should have used. Somewhat embarrassed and with a sheepish look, she said: “Listen to what I mean, not what I say.”

That made me laugh and smile. What an interesting thing to say. I’ll never forget that.

But then, recently, I realized that her amusing request is actually a very powerful statement of the quality of human interaction, and is the very thing we should be demanding of the Internet.

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When Jennifer said “Listen to what I mean, not what I say,” she was simply asking me to stop paying attention to how she was talking, and start listening to what she was actually saying. This is not a difficult feat for me — or any human — to pull off. And of all the people in her life, I — her husband — can probably do this best. I have known her for many years. I know her desires, mannerisms, dreams, and nuances.

Okay, I must admit, her mother easily holds #1 spot in this category. I don’t even try to keep up. And when I have those silly or deep conversations with my brothers, she surely wonders which planet we are from. But both of these situations illustrate my point: The best conversations happen when we don’t have to pay attention to how we talk. We just express ourselves.

When we listen to a friend excitedly share their thoughts and experiences, we are not computing the exact literal meaning of each word as they speak. We are, ultimately, listening to the meaning behind their words. The words themselves are merely an attempt to translate another level of rich meaning and emotion that resides in our friend’s mind. If we are engaged in the conversation and truly interested, it really doesn’t matter if they use improper english or a wrong word. We just know what they are saying.

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Isn’t this what we expected when we typed a question on our very first visit to Google, MSN, or Yahoo? Isn’t this what we hoped would be going on when we first heard about the Internet?

We aren’t there yet. Our current internet is an unprecedented revolution in society’s ability to communicate, to be sure. But as amazing and powerful as it is, searching for and finding what we want takes skill. We must learn a sort of language for effective searching. Even so, a search for child swallow poison drano yields hundreds of results. Clearly, there are situations where the potential of the Internet to just give us the answer is largely unfulfilled.

The Internet is a huge store of extremely valuable information, but it is a huge mess. If not for today’s powerful search sites, most of us would surely have given up on it. But today’s Internet experience is still somewhat like asking a geek librarian for books about growing vegetables and receiving from him every book in the library that happens to contain those words. Sure, he instantaneously sorted them by popularity and proximity of words, and opened them to the correct pages. That’s pretty nice, but this mindless librarian just delivered nearly 2 million books to our desk.

What kind of librarian is this? Is this some kind of joke? How did he get hired here? Is there anybody here that can just give us a few really good books about growing vegetables? I don’t know about you, but I’d surely be telling him to listen to what I mean, not what I say!

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Within 10 years, you will start to see this level of understanding from the Internet — or whatever it will be called. Pockets of researchers and scientists and visionaries are already discussing it. Some of the technologies and standards have even begun to emerge.

The day will come when you can simply type (or speak) a question and receive a meaningful, relevant answer, just as if you were talking with a very intelligent, trusted “iFriend”… We’ll call him Fred. Fred will have a familiarity with your interests, your style of speaking, and what you mean by “that hotel we stayed at in Memphis.”

Fred will also understand the combined knowledge of millions of other people like you who share their knowledge with the World. This is somewhat similar to how Wikpedia works today: Thousands of people, Worldwide, concentrate information in one place, adding new information by the second, and refining it over time.

But here is the most awesome part: instead of sitting at a computer screen with a mouse and keyboard “searching the net”, you can interact with Fred from wherever you are in the world — on the bus, snow-skiing, or working in your garden — via your hands-free virtual heads-up interface. You will talk to fred about differing views on how the French Revolution affected modern society. You can ask him how many other people around the World are skiing at this very moment and what tips they have to improve your technique. Or you can talk about which vegetables have grown best in your geographic area, and whether you should worry about those brown spots on your beet plants.

Like any decent friend, the Internet will listen to what you mean, not what you say. This future is going to happen, and my deepest ambition is to be a part of it.