Our society has begun to feel the effects of the downward spiral. These days, we feel more comfortable if we are in control of whom we talk to and when. We feel insecure meeting someone in person. Think of people in adjacent workstations—no more than 10 feet apart—emailing each other. We are cocooning ourselves within messaging bubbles where we are in contact with people but not necessarily in touch with them.
This is what Thoreau worried about. We can’t help but wonder what kind of conversationalists will emerge from the texting generation. If the medium is indeed the message, then the message is clearly, “Be brief, get to the point, respond immediately—and I’ll respond when it’s convenient for me.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-technology. In fact, I love the efficiencies that it offers. I use messaging services every day and appreciate having the expeditious and reductive option available when needed. But I also recognize how easy it is to lose touch with the borders between messaging and conversing.
I developed an exercise for my workshop audiences that illustrates this point: People are paired up and given a communication kit that includes a mask and a blindfold. I explain that they are going to have a conversation about an important life issue in three segments of 90 seconds each. In the first segment, they are required to put on the mask and communicate with a pen and pad they pass back and forth. In the second segment, they are instructed to take off the mask and put on the blindfold and then resume their conversation verbally. In the final segment, without the props, they are encouraged to converse.
In the final segment, you feel the air cleared of obvious frustration. People are talking freely and animatedly. At that point I ask, “What does this remind you of?” and participants talk about texting and phone calls—and the shortcomings of each. Participants also notice how much more people tell than they converse.
They notice that in texting we remove one additional sensory perception by removing our ears from the conversation. We can no longer hear the hesitance, the relief, or any of the other audible clues to emotion. We are trusting keyboard characters and symbols to interpret what our eyes and ears are designed to do—and that is to interpret emotion (although the use of emojis attempts to accomplish that). This compromise is that our brains are being “wired” away from the instincts to converse in a way where there’s a real exchange.
Though the move toward messaging may really be about people wanting to save time—again, it seems more about avoidance. And if so, what are they giving up? In a real conversation you can hear somebody’s inflection and cadence and sense their mood. With messaging it is far too easy to misread—we have “send” buttons but not “understand” or “interpret” buttons. A lack of practice in conversation makes for imperfection in communication.
I’m beginning to pay closer attention to what form of communication I use and the context that I use it in. I’m cautious now about being rewired away from achieving connectivity by the forms I’m using to connect. After all, sometimes only a face-to-face conversation will do.
Mitch Anthony is the creator of Life-Centered Planning, the author of 12 books for advisors, and the co-founder of ROLadvisor.com and LifeCenteredPlanners.com.