Troubles In Communication

This is from my weekly email series, The Weekly Mixtape. It’s another subpar text communication, which is the best I can do. I would still appreciate it if you subscribe to newsletter.

Hey Indiepreneurs,

I’ve probably told this story before, but I was in high school during the dot com bust. While I was talking to one of my friends, I mentioned that I thought this “internet thing” would continue to be a huge part of our lives.

“No, I think we’re about the end of it,” he replied.

That wasn’t just his opinion, either. That came directly from his economics teacher.

In this particular case, time has certainly told which one of us was right. And thanks to the (Nobel prize winning?) COVID pandemic, we rely more on internet communication than ever before.

Thanks to my particular situation, I’m one of the lucky white collar workers established in my field who especially benefited from the move to online collaboration and working from home. It’s been a boon to be able to take care of things at home that I never would have been able to do in the traditional work setting. Of course I would rather NOT have had the pandemic, but I’ll take the blessings that I get.

That said, even being one of the narrow band of people to have benefited from the change, there’s been problems. And, just maybe, my friend from high school anticipated these issues with his prognostication that the internet was dead.

The problem I want to mention right now is with online communication.

Spend five minutes on Twitter, and it’s painfully obvious that we have an online communication problem. For various reasons that smarter people than I have discussed, social media makes people type up things that they would never say if talking in person.

When our communication is through email with long time colleagues, the insults and slurs are removed, but the lack of understanding can still be pervasive. Text communicates just a fraction of how we typically share ideas (the irony of typing this out is not lost on me).

When I was younger, I was deathly afraid of using the phone. I hated calling up people for reasons that I’m sure a team of psychologists would have fun trying to unpack, but at least part of the issue was that the voice without the face left me confused by the other person’s true meaning. How could I tell what the person meant if all I had to go on was there words and their voice?

The text communication that replaced phone calls was, oddly, a relatively easy step to make. This, despite the fact it loses more than even the phone call.

This pandemic has made painfully clear to me how much I miss the rest of communication. Messaging back and forth has left me making assumptions from written speech that they never intended (as discovered upon subsequent phone conversations). Note that this is with people THAT I KNOW AND HAVE WORKED WITH FOR YEARS.

Messaging is not giving the full conversation, so we’re making assumption. Assumptions that are, so often, absolutely wrong.

Yes, phone calls and video conversations alleviate some of these issues, but there’s a reason we don’t like to do those. Scheduling them is hard. And finding a shirt that hasn’t been worn for the past week straight is just too much work.

I am a technophile, and I love the constant push forward in technology. I’m worried, though, with some of these communication developments. It might be easier to text and email and post on Twitter and Facebook. But getting people on the same page that way is almost impossible.

Keep that in mind the next time you’re collaborating with others. Sometimes the easy path in the short run makes things harder over time. After a year of this fully online stuff, I’m recognizing the gaps and trying to fill them in. It can be hard for introverts like me. But even hard things have to be done from time to time.

The Links

Eh, they were lame this week, so I’m gonna sit this one out.

Service Dog Update

For the two of you who noticed, I was out last week. We went camping…and it was a pretty miserable experience. We went to a park we’ve never been to before. It was miserably cold at night. And our our camping spot had no trees anywhere near it, which made it miserably hot in the day.

Worst of all, it was supposed to be right next to a lake…except they had drained the lake to do construction on the dam.

So no lake, no trees, no good weather.

Oh, and our neighbors–a bunch of college aged young men, stayed up until 3 in the morning talking. That would have been bad enough, except the service poodle kept hearing the voices and growling at them. All. Night. Long.

When the voices finally calmed down, Wilson started shivering. This was about the time we noticed that there was frost inside of our tent. With some coaxing, he crawled into the only warm place in the tent where he would fit: our sleeping bag (we have a two person one for my wife and I).

I later got sandwiched in with my freezing son, who, thankfully, didn’t get into the sleeping bag with us, but he did get onto our air mattress.

The only person who seemed to have a good night was my daughter, who had claimed my old zero degree mummy bag from my scout days. That thing was almost always too hot for me on my summer camping trips, but for once it was exactly the right thing.

On the plus side, Wilson did really well on the drive up and back. Though while he was taking a break on the side of the road, us humans all noticed an elk about 50 yards away staring very intently at us. The dog, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice.