Yes, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, I know. I’m busier than usual, partly because I’m in my third week of classes at USC.
But my assignments include writing commentary on our assigned readings, and these tend to take a form similar to blog posts. And one that I wrote a couple of weeks back is nearly identical to one I’ve meant to write here for at least a year or two. I haven’t written it because it was one of my long, involved posts like this one or this one. I was going to call it something like, “A Hierarchy of Communications.” Too involved. Too easy (for me) to keep putting it off.
But last week, I had occasion to write a brief summary of one of the ideas that would have been included in that tome. It went sort of like this…
Here’s something that’s long been very obvious to me, possibly because I started regularly using a keyboard to send instant messages directly to other people at some point in 1980. That’s when our newspaper in Tennessee abandoned the IBM Selectric and started generating and editing copy on the screens of dumb computer terminals linked to a mainframe. The system had this wonderful little, almost entirely superfluous, feature: You could, using this same system, generate and send a brief written message directly to anyone else in the newsroom.
I could tell you some horror stories about the trouble this caused, but I’m trying to be brief. I’ll simply say that eventually I learned that that there are things you should never try to communicate using this medium. You should instead get out of your chair, walk over and say it face-to-face.
There are all sorts of reasons for this. But mainly, it’s because when someone’s looking at you and listening, you can communicate more clearly not only emotional content (and emotions fly wildly about in a newsroom near deadlines), but the person can immediately, in a matter of seconds, ask questions that wouldn’t have occurred to you as the writer of the text – usually because you didn’t realize such questions existed.
You save a lot of time this way, and maybe even avoid a fistfight under certain awkward conditions.
Today I live in a world in which most of the billions on this planet (as opposed to the 40 in that small newsroom) possess the ability to send text to anyone else whose mobile numbers they happen to possess. And they can do a lot more with those texts, which means they can cause trouble unimagined back in 1980. (This is a central problem with social media, but let’s stick to texts at the moment.)
I’m constantly begging friends, family and sometimes mere acquaintances NOT to send that important text, but to use another convenient application, the telephone feature. (After all, we do call the thing a “phone,” right?) It would save a lot of time, often a half hour or so of multiple, imperfectly typed and even less perfectly understood texts back and forth. Time and again, these matters could be handled more fully and efficiently with a 30-second conversation.
Evidently, I’ve seldom explained this well, because I don’t often succeed in convincing anyone.
So I refer you to the text in the box. The author tells us that spoken language:
- allows confusion and ambiguity to be resolved directly by repair and confirmation procedures
- is used in a social and temporal context, and thus brings with it a great deal of background information; draws on context to complement meaning and fill in ellipses
Absolutely. Written communications don’t offer these same valuable features.
Anyway, that’s the end of what I said — on that one subject — in my notes on the reading. It would have been just one point among many in my treatise on the full range of options in daily interpersonal communications.
Here’s the aforementioned box, from page 20 of English with an Accent, by Rosina Lippi-Green.
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Just to share a little bit of what I would have put in that longer post…
I started writing this post several days ago right after one of those frustrating experiences when someone has refused to speak on the phone for one minute, insisting upon a back-and-forth, back-and-forth written conversation, most of it based on a misinterpretation of the initial text by the recipient. A conversation that seldom lasts less than half an hour, usually more — thanks to the lags between the individual texts. I have this experience several times a week, if not more, with family, co-workers, and others.
There’s a certain kind of question that is perfect for a text — something like, “Are we meeting at 11?” If the answer is affirmative, you can express it with a thumbs-up. If it’s negative, you respond with the correct time. Excellent. Minimal distraction.
There are loads that are NOT. Sometimes, it takes several sentences — a paragraph or two, maybe — even to let the person know what the problem is. After having spent four-and-a-half decades communicating electronically, I know the difference. I know how much more quickly some things can be expressed on the phone rather than via writing. And one of the biggest reasons speaking can be better is that even before you finish the question, you can often tell the hearer isn’t understanding it, and can change course. Because a spoken conversation “allows confusion and ambiguity to be resolved directly.”
For that reason, sometimes there’s no substitute for an even higher communication mode — face-to-face. So much information passes back and forth so quickly that it’s often worth the travel. (And no, Facetime and Zoom don’t quite get it done. Which is why people don’t use video phone mode nearly as often as sci-fi writers once imagined they would,)
I said “higher communication mode” there, but I’m not sure “Hierarchies of Communication” would be the right headline (or title, if I turned it into a book, which it could certainly be).
It’s not that communication mode X is always better than communications mode Y. Each has its virtues. The same week I wrote the notes used in the above post, I wrote others extolling the superiority of the written word — but for different purposes. So not really a hierarchy. More a guide to when to use the right method for the situation.
The point of such a book (and increasingly, it feels like a book) would be to eliminate the waste of time and confusion of messages because of people constantly choosing the wrong medium for the message, now that they have so many. So maybe the title should be some play on the famous Marshall McLuhan quote.