Two

Keep It “Fur” Real: Going Low-Tech

One reason a dog can be such a comfort
when you’re feeling blue is that he
doesn’t try to find out why.

—Author Unknown

You may still be intrigued to learn how Fido, sitting at your feet and furiously scratching that sudden itch attack, could possibly guide you to the personal prosperity Promised Land. Nevertheless, if you find yourself doubting the pawsibility of my thesis consider these questions:

Would a dog log on to eHydrants.com to post a profile instead of . . . um, “using” a real hydrant?

Would a dog spend its afternoons roaming around World of Woofcraft with a virtual dog pack instead of its real friends?

Would a dog pretend to listen to you because it was too busy tweeting (or arfing, as the case may be)?

If you asked a dog to go for a walk, would it look vaguely annoyed at you for interrupting its texting session and tell you to “Shoot me an e-mail with the deets”?

Would a dog sniff another dog’s virtual butt instead of the real McCoy?

Technology today is a truly magical thing. It lets us communicate in all sorts of exciting ways that we couldn’t just a few years ago—text messages, e-mail, Skype, GoToMeeting, Twitter, etc. It lets us summon help when our car breaks down in the desert and order a pizza while lying on the beach. It lets us schedule and reschedule meet-ups in real time. It lets us play Scrabble with a partner in Vancouver while sitting on our front porch in Albuquerque. It lets us share videos of dogs on skateboards with our circles of friends, and their friends, and the friends of the friends of their friends.

Few would argue that technology isn’t pretty awesome, but . . .

It seems the easier, faster, and more fun it’s becoming to connect with one another virtually, the harder it’s becoming to connect with one another in reality. That’s a loss. A biggie.

Here’s where I think the heart of the problem lies: listening is where humans forge real and lasting connections with other people, but technology drastically reduces our need and opportunity to truly listen.

Techno-Primary Relationships

Every advance we make in virtual communications eliminates yet another need to connect in person. For example, each time you buy a product online, you forgo a trip to a brick-and-mortar store (where you typically have face-to-face conversations). This may be a good way to save time, but it also decreases our connections with other live human beings. Technology also reduces the number of live conversations you have with friends, colleagues, and relatives. Texts and e-mails have become primary ways to “talk” to others. Texting is great when it facilitates personal encounters (“Let’s meet at Smitty’s at 5”), but not so great when it replaces them.

Increasingly, our relationships with the people outside our immediate home or office are being reduced to techno-primary ones. Less and less often do we need to see these people in the flesh or talk to them live. As a loony example, someone dear to me told me that one of her best friends recently announced she needed to switch her relationships to primarily texting relationships. She said that with work and the kids, she no longer had time for talking on the phone, not to mention meeting in person with friends. Yep. Sad. Texting, social networking, e-mailing, and online games are seriously diluting the attention we pay to the people around us. I recently visited a family, and when I saw them sitting together in the living room, with no TV on, I thought, Hurray for family time! I quickly realized, though, that each of them was using an iPhone or iPad! Two were playing online games, one was instant-messaging, another was skimming her social networking sites. A family of four—or four strangers in the same room?

Interestingly, if you are a heavy techno-adopter, you may not feel you’ve lost touch with the human race. In fact, you probably believe you’re ultra-connected. But consider how your relationships are becoming more digitized, abstract, and time-delayed. Thanks to e-mail, texting, and voicemail, you now respond to people at your convenience, rather than theirs, eliminating much of the need to listen to live human beings—and even when you do listen, you do so on your terms and your schedule.

The more real your smartphone and tablet are becoming to you, the more unreal people are becoming. Is that an overstatement? I wish it were. In the movie Her, a lonely, introverted, depressed man develops a love relationship with an intelligent computer operating system (OS), personified through a female voice. He becomes completely content with this “virtual” woman versus one in real life. The “virtual” woman was a great listener, however. Fascinating.

Listening is where humans forge real and lasting connections with other people, but technology drastically reduces our need and opportunity to listen.

Dogs, the Low-Tech Wonder

Dogs, however, are the real deal.

At a time when human relationships are becoming more abstract and virtual, dog ownership is at an all-time high. Coincidence? I suspect not.

Dogs are the one relationship in our lives that refuses to be digitized in any way. Dogs are the ultimate in low tech: a furry, warm, wet, “fragrant” presence in a circuitry-driven world.

Dogs are all about the real: the perfect antidote to our rushed, superficial, click-button style of communicating. In the midst of our digital world, dogs remain stubbornly analog, and that’s what we love about them. Dogs insist upon being rolled around with and petted. You can’t send a dog an e-mail or a text. (Well, you can, but it’s generally not very productive.) Dogs demand our full, living presence.

Dogs tear us away from our computers and iPads. They get us dirty, wet, and smelly. They jump all over us and give us slobbery kisses. They inconvenience us tremendously—and we love them for it.

David Shaw, a psychologist on Maui, was recently quoted in a New York Times article as saying, “Today, dogs are one of the primary relationships—if not the primary relationship—in many people’s lives.”1 Your dog is your lifeline to what’s real.

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/magazine/is-your-relationship-with-fido-on-the-rocks.html

What if you were to be that kind of presence to others? What if you refused to be digitized away? What if you were to risk being a slight inconvenience to others in exchange for being real and authentic?

Consider how that might affect your life and your career. How would that help you make your mark on the world?

As you consider your responses, let’s take a look at some of the challenges of communicating in today’s techno world.

Quality Versus Quantity

When it comes to communications, numbers are the new macho. We often take pride in the sheer volume of our LinkedIn connections, Twitter followers, and Facebook friends.

Not long ago, LinkedIn sent out virtual “awards” to users who had hit the top 5 percent and top 1 percent of “most viewed profiles,” designating these people as “Influencers.” I saw some colleagues of mine earnestly congratulating one another on having attained one of these LinkedIn achievements.

But what do these numbers really mean? How many of your online “friends” would you know if you passed them on the street? How many could you call on the phone, knowing they’d drop what they were doing to give you a shoulder to cry on?

Does having hundreds of digital contacts provide us any real value?

Well, yes, in certain ways, it does. In business, for example, it can be helpful to have a large network, especially if you are selling a particular skill, product, or service, or are seeking to meet new people in your field. But my personal (and admittedly biased) observation is that many of us put a lot of effort into beefing up the quantity of our connections without gaining much quality in return. I mean, can we really maintain relationships with 632 people?

Not according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar. In a recent article in IEEE Spectrum, he asserts that, owing to the structure of our primate brains, the largest number of relationships we can handle is around 150. This is now known as the Dunbar number.

However, Dunbar also says, “If you start to invest less time in a friendship, the emotional quality of the relationship will decay within at most six months. The relationship will gradually bump its way down . . . until eventually it slips over the weir [dam] at 150 and that person becomes ‘one of those people I once knew.’”2

2 http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/how-many-friends-can-you-really-have

The true value of sites like Facebook, then, may be that they allow us to tend our real-world relationships, to keep them alive and relevant. That’s great, provided we also do some connecting with these people in the real world. Otherwise, all we’ve succeeded in doing is juggling a greater number of pseudo relationships.

No self-respecting dog would stand (or sit, or stay) for that.

The Time Crunch

Another way that technology shrinks communication is by demanding that you do more with less time. So you are almost forced to make your communications faster, more efficient, and less personal. Every new technology that comes along is first seen as a way to save time. But, of course, it never does. The telephone was supposed to save us the time of traveling to meetings. E-mail was supposed to save us the time and delay of making phone calls and mailing letters. But what happens is that everyone adopts the technology and then we all just expect each other to get more done in the course of a day. No one would have expected an employee in the 1970s to write fifty letters a day, even if that was his or her entire job, but many people now routinely send that number of e-mails daily, while tending to many other important responsibilities. Naturally, this makes us eager to keep our communications brisk and no frills.

At some point you need to make a decision. Are you just going to play the digital efficiency game? Or, are you going to become a dog-like presence in the lives of others? Real. Messy. Attentive. Caring.

I urge you to consider making the sloppy, furry choice.

What’s Lost Between the Digits

To “digitize” anything means to break it down into modular units. Think of a digital photo, for example. It creates a representation of a picture, but it’s really just a collection of individual pixels. The more closely you look at it, the more you realize what’s missing. Your brain fills in all the missing stuff.

Today, many of our communications are reduced to purely digital choices: to “like” someone’s post or not; to “accept” a friend request or not; to rate a review as helpful or not.

You might think real information is being exchanged here, but is it? The shaded truth behind the digits becomes lost.

I can imagine the day in the near future, when communications are reduced to clicking icons or pre-written snatches of conversation:

Received: “Ellen has sent you a conversation module. Would you like to accept? J or L”

Sent: “J”

Received: “Dear [Bob], I am breaking up with you. Goodbye.” (module created by ChatSplats, ©2019)

Sent: “L”

The problem with digitization is that you end up not knowing people as well as you think. The biggest part of the other person is lost between the digits. You fill in the rest with your own mind and your own biases.

The funny thing is, we think we live in an advanced age of communications, but, because of digitization, much of our communication has been reduced to crude symbols that are wildly open to misinterpretation.

But the important stuff in life—the real, human stuff—is tender, shaded, and subtle. It doesn’t come through in digital form. It has to be experienced live.

It has to get on your lap and lick you like a dog.

Text Wars

More and more, our communications are being channeled into text. We love texting. It’s clean and efficient. Also, we don’t feel as if we’re bothering or inconveniencing others when we do it. Most of all, we’re not inconveniencing ourselves. “Do I really need to call them? Can’t I just shoot off a text?” It’s funny to me how burdensome the phone call has become to so many people. Consider that when we text, we are sending a set of words to the receiver, and yet we’re not considering that a large percentage of our communication comes through our tone, our body language, and ourselves. So that means, by texting we’re leaving a lot of who we are on the cutting-room floor. That doesn’t matter so much when we’re exchanging factual information, but it matters a lot when we’re talking about anything with an emotional component. And that’s a lot of things.

Still, texting has become a preferred means of communicating in business—so much so that I now get a look of mild surprise when I ask someone to call me back. “Call? Can’t I just shoot you a text?” It’s like I’ve just asked them to send a letter by Pony Express. This shift is happening in our personal lives, too. I am shocked to observe, for example, how texting has overtaken the dating world. I recently witnessed a colleague of mine telling a woman he was dating that he’d like to call her that evening. Her reply? “Just text me.” Understand: she wasn’t blowing him off; in fact, she liked him! In the dating world, texting has far too often become the primary means of communication. A woman will leave her number for a man so he can text her. She gets excited when she receives a text from him, and feels hurt when she doesn’t receive a text. A man will ask a woman out via text, ask about her day via text, tell her how pretty she is via text, and eventually break up with her via text (unless she texts him first for that same reason). It’s a miracle people ever got together before text messaging came along.

Why do we favor texting so much these days? The short answer, I believe, is that when we communicate by text, we don’t have to listen. We’ve trained ourselves not to listen! After all, who has time to listen?! Let’s face it, we’ve become lazy, and a simple little text allows us to feel that we have done our part to communicate. Yay.

The dangerous part of texting is that we have the opportunity to insert our own interpretation of the text. When you receive a text, you receive a set of words that are up to you to guess the intent. Have you ever been involved in one of these mishaps? Someone texts something and it’s taken differently than intended and then, uh oh—mayhem! The famous quote “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” comes to mind here. If the human element was present, we could avoid many of these mishaps, which occur at an astonishing rate.

It’s fascinating that, even as texting has been gaining popularity, we have been inventing new technologies that can actually improve our ability to connect and listen: Skype and FaceTime, for example. If you had asked me twenty-five years ago which would be a more popular form of communicating in the future—video phone calls or written text—I would have guessed the former, hands down. But that hasn’t happened. For most of us, text is king.

Why? I think one big reason is because Skype forces us to do many of the same things we have to do in live conversations. Not only do we have to comb our hair, clean our desks, and look presentable (no minor consideration), but we also have to engage with the other person. We have to make (virtual) eye contact and actually listen. We can’t be sneakily writing e-mails or clipping our toenails. Sad but true.

Output, Output, Output

Another weakness of technology, from a connection standpoint, is that, as I mentioned earlier, it’s caused us to fall in love with output, not input (i.e., listening).

The Internet lets us advertise ourselves without the inconvenience of giving reciprocal attention to someone else. Many people today, it seems, are looking for followers more than conversational partners. They want people to “like” their Facebook pages and read their tweets and blogs. It’s totally one-way. No listening required.

We’re coming dangerously close to the day we don’t even tell our mates we love them anymore—“Just follow me on Instagram, honey.”

To me, all of this output shows a desperate desire to be heard, and the Web lulls us into a false sense of being heard. Just because 759 people have seen your post doesn’t mean you’ve been listened to—it means you’ve given 759 people a chance to offer their output in response to your output.

Dogs, on the other hand, are much more invested in receiving input—smells, sounds, sights—than they are in producing output (obvious poop jokes aside). A dog is in bliss when it can just lie there, smelling the scents and listening to the sounds being carried by the breeze. A walk in the woods is the greatest treat in the world for a dog. Because it’s an opportunity to bark and make noise? No, because it’s an opportunity to download all the glorious sensory input available there.

The Myth of Multitasking

One of the worst ways in which technology has weakened the art of listening has been to make multitasking the norm. Technology makes it possible to listen while doing other things—like posting a YouTube video—or so we tell ourselves.

The truth is that multitasking is an illusion. Humans can’t actually multitask; we can focus on only one task at a time. Brain studies show that when we try to do two things at once, such as write an e-mail and have a conversation, task interference is created and our brains get scrambled. What we’re really doing when we think we’re multitasking is rapidly shifting our attention from one task to another.3 We might believe we’re listening to someone while writing a text message—“Yeah, yeah, I’m listening, go on”—but we’re not. We’re selectively tuning the person in and out, and of course losing much of what is being said. And the other person feels it.

3 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794

The crazy thing is that we multitask in the name of efficiency, but we’re really being extremely inefficient. We would get much more done if we just attended to one task at a time, fully and completely. That means if someone walks into our office to talk, it’s better to stop writing that e-mail and actually listen to the person for a few minutes—and then return to the e-mail. In this way, we not only do a much better job of hearing the person, but we also write a better e-mail, in less time.

Dogs do one task at a time. When it’s time to listen, that’s all they do. And think about this: dogs have much more sensitive ears than ours, so theoretically they should be more easily distracted than we are; but their ability to focus on the task at hand and on the person they’re with is amazing. We could learn a great deal about “uni-tasking” from dogs.

The Wonders of Low-Tech

If you want to influence people, you need to put the human touch back into your communications. Ironically, that means being more like a dog. It means offering your live, messy presence to others
—in person if possible, by phone or Skype if not.

We get to know people best by seeing and hearing them in real time. That means that in today’s tech-driven world, the best way to get noticed is to step outside the tech bubble and be real. I’m not saying you should abandon technology; just use it more consciously and deliberately. Each of the new tools at your disposal—texting, social networking, e-mail—has some great assets. Texting, for example, is terrific for making plans on the fly. Facebook is great, as I mentioned earlier, for tending relationships, provided there is something real being tended. When you need to quickly check a traffic report, thank goodness for the smartphone. A casual flirt? Fun! Arguing with a significant other via text? Not so much. Where we go wrong is when we use techno communications for purposes that require a human touch—or when we give them priority over a human who is actually present.

This is the bottom-line question you should ask yourself every time you techno-communicate: will this communication lead to a stronger real-world connection with this person, or am I using it as a substitute for a real-world connection? If the latter is true, make the low-tech choice.

I was in a car accident a few years ago and received many texts and e-mails wishing me well. Though I appreciated these messages—I really did—the one person who really made a mark on me was a friend who made the effort to call me several times to actually ask how I was doing and to listen to my answers. He didn’t take over and tell me all about the accident that he was in eons ago and the peril he endured. The conversation was about my accident, not his. I felt heard. I felt cared about. No leash-law violations occurred, and I appreciated it.

If you want to make a mark, truly make a mark, try to avoid digital communication whenever possible. Pick up the phone and make a call. Walk over to someone’s office and talk in person. Arrange a lunch or get-together. Handle awkward and difficult conversations personally, not by e-mail. Always respond to a phone call with a phone call, not a text. After all:

Would a dog text you a request for a treat, even if it could?

Would a dog click a “wag tail” button to tell you it liked you?

Would a dog wait in line for days for the release of the iBark 9?

When it comes to personal relationships, take a tip from your dog; try these low-tech, high-impact options:

Want to make a mark? Put the smartphone away. It’ll still be there when you need it. Promise.

Something to
Chew On . . .

Pavlov’s Dogs

If you’ve ever taken a psychology class, no doubt you studied the concept of “classical conditioning.” This famous theory was conducted by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, aided by his team of assistants—notably dogs. Pavlov was studying the response of salivation and the digestive system when he noticed that the dogs would often begin salivating even in the absence of food and smell. As he discovered, the dogs were reacting to lab coats because every time the dogs were served food, the person who served it was wearing a lab coat. Therefore, the dogs reacted as if food was on its way whenever they saw a lab coat.

In a series of experiments, Pavlov then tried to figure out how these phenomena were linked. For example, he struck a bell at doggie dinnertime. If the bell was sounded in close association with their kibble, the dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell with food. Subsequently, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling. This response is called “conditioned reflex,” and the process whereby dogs or humans learn to connect a stimulus to a reflex is called “conditioning.”

The experiences of Pavlov and his intrepid team of canines can also teach us how thoroughly conditioned we are, especially when listening. We hear a word that triggers an emotional response—like “taxes”—and suddenly we’re off in our own world, worrying about our 1040 and no longer effectively listening. Once we recognize our own leash-law violations, we can take control and come back into the conversation—fully present and attentive.