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The Future Of Communication
A couple of events transpired recently that have me questioning if communication as we know it (or at least as we old timers have come to know it) is in crisis.
The first took place at Kinkos, where I needed to get some material printed. In general, I have never found Kinkos to be the most helpful or customer friendly place. The staff seem to always be busy with other things, often treating paying customers as if they were an annoyance. But this was different. The young lady who took my order certainly wasn't rude. She just....wasn't there. She is a 'digital native' who probably does 90% of her communicating or more via a device. She had an intuitive sense of what I required, but almost zero ability to convey that to me. She would give very brief instructions. She told me to place the number 8 in a box that I could have written an obituary in. So, I wanted to make sure; perhaps there was a smaller little box to place the number in that I wasn't seeing... 'You mean here?' I asked. A tiny 'uh' was all I got. No explanation for what the 8 was necessary for.
Then she wandered off. I had no idea why. I stood there confused. She returned, did a couple things, and told me to have a seat. I assumed she was going to make an order form. She was gone a LONG time. Had she forgotten? Was she taking a break? I went to the desk and nobody seemed to know where she was, or even very interested in finding out. So I sat down again. Finally, she returned, NOT with an order form, but with the materials I had requested! She didn't say she was going to make them, just told me to have a seat. She brought them to me, I was surprised, and she was gone. I took my purchase to the front desk to pay, and never saw her again.
It was as if an efficient robot had served me, not a human. However, to her, young and digitally acclimatized, there was probably nothing unusual. She didn't even acknowledge my expressions of confusion and later surprise. Nothing. She had a series of tasks which she understood, and she did them. Keeping me in the loop didn't even occur to her.
From my perspective, this was not good customer service, but from another perspective, perhaps a more modern one, it was as good as it needed to be, no niceties and no extra words. Welcome to a brave new world.
The second episode happened the following day. In the midst of a disagreement, in an attempt to make a point, somebody informed me that if they judged me from FB only, they would consider me to be a 'consistent and insufferable asshole', while magnanimously informing me that in real life I'm a good person.
I was stunned and hurt by this remark, and also confused as to why this person felt the need to go for the jugular in that way.
This person and I hold political views that are in most cases divergent. We are also both confident and brash in how we communicate our opinions. We haven't held back from each other, and in my assessment there had also been a give and take of ribbing, trusting that the other could take it.
Clearly, I was wrong about this. A comment like that indicates that the person had this opinion of me for a while and resented our previous jousts, and what they had not communicated up till that post was brewing in them, unspoken.
This brings up several things for me. The first was that this person has a very limited view of my FB persona. On my wall, I post artwork, I write copiously about my philosophy and spirituality, I make jokes, and am active in other ways as well. I also post strongly opinionated (but to my mind informed) comments about matters concerning which he and I are in disagreement. Does that, in sum total, make me a consistent asshole?
This person rarely comments upon anything else I post. 95% of the time, he has popped up on my thread solely to take issue with something I wrote about a social or political issue. Basically to point out where I am 'wrong'. Does he not see anything else I post, not care about it, think it is less representative of my online/FB persona than the comments that make me an ‘asshole’?
Clearly, things between us have been poorly communicated, miscommunicated, or un-communicated up until now. And that has been a kind of wake up call, similarly to my interaction with the Kinkos staff.
The thing that struck me about this episode was that people have different ideas about what online personae are, how valuable they are to us, how much they truly represent us, etc. Some people don't even consider whether the persona they present through social media is different from the 'real' them, while others make clear distinctions and thus think it is less rude to attack the persona (i.e. refer to it as an 'asshole') than the person.
What this person didn't know about me is that I am both very aware that my online voice is a persona that I have cultivated and also that I really LIKE it. So to me, it would be like someone went to an art exhibition I was holding and said, 'Andy, this work is all just junk, but I do think of you as a good person'. Essentially, that is how I received the remark.
My online persona arose out of comments made and received back in the days when the Huffington Post was actually an interesting and even important forum for people outside traditional media to exchange views on topics of great interest, ranging from politics to science to entertainment. It was a free for all, but it was also a place where people tended to understand the unspoken rules. If things got a little rough and tumble, people were expected to accept this within limits. Comments that had a certain amount of bite to them tended to get more attention and responses, and these were ways that people gained clout on the site. Most of my life, the 'real me' was non-confrontational, mostly keeping my opinions to myself (if I even took the time to form them) and often finding myself just nodding along with what a more loquacious person was saying to me, whether I agreed or not. Thus, I was quite surprised with myself when this new 'me' came into being on social media. Suddenly, I was being bold, being witty, risking offense. I was willing to defend my own views and challenge those of others. I loved the responses I got and the quasi-friendships with kindred spirits I formed through this persona, which I named 'whatsthatsound' after the Buffalo Springfield song, to show that I was left leaning and a bit of a rebel.
My online persona, although it is not to everyone's tastes, is as dear to ME as are my art pieces, the songs that I write and all other manner in which I express myself through some specific medium or endeavor. Insulting it, referring to it as an ‘insufferable asshole’ crossed a bridge and burned it to the ground as far as I am concerned.
These two seemingly unrelated incidents converge upon the point of illustrating just how much communication has changed in the three decades in which the internet and chat technology have emerged. We are playing with a lot of new tools now, and making up the rules as we go along.
We are also, clearly, devaluing earlier ground rules that have existed for centuries. Perhaps the reason the clerk at Kinkos was so unmoved by my nonverbal cues of confusion and surprise was that she was less able to pick up and accurately interpret such cues than someone born half a century ago.
As for the person who insulted me, it seems he just assumed that I view online personae the same way he does, as lesser aspects of one’s being that can be trashed, so long as one takes pains to explain that the 'real' person makes the cut.
My discomfort in the first episode and hurt in the second largely come down to my having different expectations than those I was communicating with, which were not adequately fulfilled. We weren't playing the same game, in other words, though to all appearances we were.
Such miscues are extremely prevalent now, and will surely increase as technological developments keep adding (and by extension subtracting) ways to connect Person A with Person B (or thousands, or millions, of Person Bs).
This may all work out for the best, and then again it may not. Human beings are very adaptable and resilient, yes. But there are limits. Communication is the core of civilization, its sin qua non. Without communication, nothing humans value would have ever been achieved. No pyramids, no Sistine Chapel, no White Album. Technology is rapidly churning out new types of communication modes one after another, but the whole edifice could come crashing down like The Tower of Babel if we don't ensure that the ground floor remains firm.
The first took place at Kinkos, where I needed to get some material printed. In general, I have never found Kinkos to be the most helpful or customer friendly place. The staff seem to always be busy with other things, often treating paying customers as if they were an annoyance. But this was different. The young lady who took my order certainly wasn't rude. She just....wasn't there. She is a 'digital native' who probably does 90% of her communicating or more via a device. She had an intuitive sense of what I required, but almost zero ability to convey that to me. She would give very brief instructions. She told me to place the number 8 in a box that I could have written an obituary in. So, I wanted to make sure; perhaps there was a smaller little box to place the number in that I wasn't seeing... 'You mean here?' I asked. A tiny 'uh' was all I got. No explanation for what the 8 was necessary for.
Then she wandered off. I had no idea why. I stood there confused. She returned, did a couple things, and told me to have a seat. I assumed she was going to make an order form. She was gone a LONG time. Had she forgotten? Was she taking a break? I went to the desk and nobody seemed to know where she was, or even very interested in finding out. So I sat down again. Finally, she returned, NOT with an order form, but with the materials I had requested! She didn't say she was going to make them, just told me to have a seat. She brought them to me, I was surprised, and she was gone. I took my purchase to the front desk to pay, and never saw her again.
It was as if an efficient robot had served me, not a human. However, to her, young and digitally acclimatized, there was probably nothing unusual. She didn't even acknowledge my expressions of confusion and later surprise. Nothing. She had a series of tasks which she understood, and she did them. Keeping me in the loop didn't even occur to her.
From my perspective, this was not good customer service, but from another perspective, perhaps a more modern one, it was as good as it needed to be, no niceties and no extra words. Welcome to a brave new world.
The second episode happened the following day. In the midst of a disagreement, in an attempt to make a point, somebody informed me that if they judged me from FB only, they would consider me to be a 'consistent and insufferable asshole', while magnanimously informing me that in real life I'm a good person.
I was stunned and hurt by this remark, and also confused as to why this person felt the need to go for the jugular in that way.
This person and I hold political views that are in most cases divergent. We are also both confident and brash in how we communicate our opinions. We haven't held back from each other, and in my assessment there had also been a give and take of ribbing, trusting that the other could take it.
Clearly, I was wrong about this. A comment like that indicates that the person had this opinion of me for a while and resented our previous jousts, and what they had not communicated up till that post was brewing in them, unspoken.
This brings up several things for me. The first was that this person has a very limited view of my FB persona. On my wall, I post artwork, I write copiously about my philosophy and spirituality, I make jokes, and am active in other ways as well. I also post strongly opinionated (but to my mind informed) comments about matters concerning which he and I are in disagreement. Does that, in sum total, make me a consistent asshole?
This person rarely comments upon anything else I post. 95% of the time, he has popped up on my thread solely to take issue with something I wrote about a social or political issue. Basically to point out where I am 'wrong'. Does he not see anything else I post, not care about it, think it is less representative of my online/FB persona than the comments that make me an ‘asshole’?
Clearly, things between us have been poorly communicated, miscommunicated, or un-communicated up until now. And that has been a kind of wake up call, similarly to my interaction with the Kinkos staff.
The thing that struck me about this episode was that people have different ideas about what online personae are, how valuable they are to us, how much they truly represent us, etc. Some people don't even consider whether the persona they present through social media is different from the 'real' them, while others make clear distinctions and thus think it is less rude to attack the persona (i.e. refer to it as an 'asshole') than the person.
What this person didn't know about me is that I am both very aware that my online voice is a persona that I have cultivated and also that I really LIKE it. So to me, it would be like someone went to an art exhibition I was holding and said, 'Andy, this work is all just junk, but I do think of you as a good person'. Essentially, that is how I received the remark.
My online persona arose out of comments made and received back in the days when the Huffington Post was actually an interesting and even important forum for people outside traditional media to exchange views on topics of great interest, ranging from politics to science to entertainment. It was a free for all, but it was also a place where people tended to understand the unspoken rules. If things got a little rough and tumble, people were expected to accept this within limits. Comments that had a certain amount of bite to them tended to get more attention and responses, and these were ways that people gained clout on the site. Most of my life, the 'real me' was non-confrontational, mostly keeping my opinions to myself (if I even took the time to form them) and often finding myself just nodding along with what a more loquacious person was saying to me, whether I agreed or not. Thus, I was quite surprised with myself when this new 'me' came into being on social media. Suddenly, I was being bold, being witty, risking offense. I was willing to defend my own views and challenge those of others. I loved the responses I got and the quasi-friendships with kindred spirits I formed through this persona, which I named 'whatsthatsound' after the Buffalo Springfield song, to show that I was left leaning and a bit of a rebel.
My online persona, although it is not to everyone's tastes, is as dear to ME as are my art pieces, the songs that I write and all other manner in which I express myself through some specific medium or endeavor. Insulting it, referring to it as an ‘insufferable asshole’ crossed a bridge and burned it to the ground as far as I am concerned.
These two seemingly unrelated incidents converge upon the point of illustrating just how much communication has changed in the three decades in which the internet and chat technology have emerged. We are playing with a lot of new tools now, and making up the rules as we go along.
We are also, clearly, devaluing earlier ground rules that have existed for centuries. Perhaps the reason the clerk at Kinkos was so unmoved by my nonverbal cues of confusion and surprise was that she was less able to pick up and accurately interpret such cues than someone born half a century ago.
As for the person who insulted me, it seems he just assumed that I view online personae the same way he does, as lesser aspects of one’s being that can be trashed, so long as one takes pains to explain that the 'real' person makes the cut.
My discomfort in the first episode and hurt in the second largely come down to my having different expectations than those I was communicating with, which were not adequately fulfilled. We weren't playing the same game, in other words, though to all appearances we were.
Such miscues are extremely prevalent now, and will surely increase as technological developments keep adding (and by extension subtracting) ways to connect Person A with Person B (or thousands, or millions, of Person Bs).
This may all work out for the best, and then again it may not. Human beings are very adaptable and resilient, yes. But there are limits. Communication is the core of civilization, its sin qua non. Without communication, nothing humans value would have ever been achieved. No pyramids, no Sistine Chapel, no White Album. Technology is rapidly churning out new types of communication modes one after another, but the whole edifice could come crashing down like The Tower of Babel if we don't ensure that the ground floor remains firm.
