The interpersonal communication squeeze
In the 1970s, when I was six years old and you could meet arriving passengers at the airport gate, my dad and I waited at Houston’s Intercontinental Airport for my uncle to arrive from North Carolina. When the plane pulled in, I worked my way to the front of the crowd. I could see his big smile yards away, and I ran to meet him.
“You got here fast,” I said as I gripped him in my best bear hug.
“Next time I’ll come on a spaceship,” he replied, “and get here even faster.”
My uncle probably wasn’t the only person at the airport that day who, if asked to make a prediction about the future, would have guessed that spaceships or jet packs might soon beam us around the globe.
But they would have been wrong. Forty years later, we still get from one place to another pretty much the same way, from the fossil fuels to the uncomfortable seats. Instead of revolutionary ways to transport our bodies around the earth, humans spent the past few decades figuring out how to speed our words and images around the planet. The transportation revolution never arrived. We got a communication revolution instead.1
Around the time that I was greeting my uncle at the gate, the world’s first generation of computer geeks was busy trying to configure a personal machine that wouldn’t break our desks and a phone that didn’t need a cord. Advances in computing and telecommunications gathered speed through the 1980s and 1990s. Then, in the mid-1990s, the Internet arrived, kicking off the digital communication revolution in earnest.
Almost two decades later, here we are, inundated with smart-phones, laptops, iPads, VOIP, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, apps, and countless other technologies that allow us to connect quickly, cheaply, and easily across the globe. These advances have been incredibly beneficial, enabling billions of people to communicate with each other, share information, and spread ideas.
The communication revolution transformed our lives so thoroughly and so quickly that we’re still scrambling to understand the changes that our powerful new tools unleashed. What we do know, though, is that the changes are not uniformly positive.
The digital Promised Land turns out to be infested with a kudzulike thicket of unintended consequences. Just as the “miracle vine”2 eventually ended up as the “vine that ate the South,”3 our remarkable digital devices are beginning to overpower, entangle, and suffocate some of our best—and our most human—communication behaviors.
The very tools that enable us to maintain contact with people all over the world also serve, at times, to scatter our limited attention across too many areas. We fiddle with our smartphones during meetings and upset our coworkers. We bungle an interaction with an important colleague because we’re distracted by an e-mail. We interrupt a fruitful collaboration to respond to a trivial text message. We use a social media platform to reconnect with an old work acquaintance, only to offend her with an ill-advised attempt at humor or a provocative statement of our political beliefs. We type an e-mail to a client while talking to a coworker on the phone, loading the e-mail with typos while simultaneously mangling the phone conversation.
Today, it is possible to accumulate scores of friends and still feel lonely; be connected to hundreds of people and feel like no one is listening; and spend hours at work, sending and responding to countless messages, but still feel unproductive. The revolution has made it easy to communicate with other people, but the meaningful—or even just effective—connections we desire seem to be more elusive than ever.
What kind of a revolution is this?
The digital communication revolution changed our lives, but it brought three significant types of collateral damage.4
The communication revolution created an environment that’s paradoxically inhospitable to effective communication. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how this happened. Humans love to talk, and we crave connections with others. We were given powerful new tools to do just that, and in no time flat, the rate and volume of our communication exploded. We started hypercommunicating.
But a hypercommunicating environment leads to message overload and distracted conversations, which, in turn, cause error-prone interactions.5 These errors add stress to our lives and inflate existing problems, amplifying hypercommunication’s negative cycle of overload-error-problem.
Evidence keeps piling up about the debilitating impact of digital distractions on our concentration, about the toll that multitasking places on our cognition, and about the ways that our addictions to electronic rewards and online diversions distort our priorities.6 Our concentration fragments, our ability to listen degrades, and our attention scatters.
Many of us have a nagging sense that it’s getting harder to communicate well, to prevent our quick-draw tongues from saying harmful things, or to stop our fingers from hammering out impulsive messages. And we’re right. Researchers have demonstrated that our willpower is finite and that it becomes depleted as we draw upon it.7 The mind-numbing, limitless options and the tantalizing temptations of the digital age are burning through our reserves of willpower, degrading our decisions, and making us distracted and unproductive.
Even though I make my living as a communication consultant, I can see the impact in my own life. Two decades ago, the undergraduate version of me could focus and write a complete research paper in one sitting, but today I can’t produce a grocery list without stopping to check my e-mail twice. Without any natural military acumen, as a younger man I willed myself through Ranger School, but now I can’t manage to will myself to finish a simple paragraph without clicking over to Google News to see what’s happening. And even while I’m writing about how distractions harm our closest relationships, I still have difficulty resisting my vibrating cell phone when I’m talking with my wife, and I find it hard to avoid checking for new messages when I’m on a call with a client.
In almost every other area of my life, I am shaking off counterproductive behaviors and becoming a better, more complete person. I’ve never been more sensible, more grounded, or more mature. So why on earth do I feel like I was more productive 20 years ago, when I was less developed in virtually every way?
The answer: Twenty years ago there weren’t so many tempting distractions, or so many seductive ways to yield to an impulse. The digital communication revolution ushered in a world of endless choices and captivating diversions that require an almost heroic level of self-control and focus to counteract.8 It’s hard to imagine an environment less conducive to productive and meaningful communication than our current setup.
Humans are an eminently adaptable, shortcut-loving species. Give us a barrier, and we’ll find a way around it; show us a leak, and we’ll devise a patch. So when the digital revolution led to hypercommunication and message overload, we found a workaround. We downshifted to the quickest, cheapest, and easiest ways to communicate.9
Too many e-mails? Reply with one-sentence messages, stop capitalizing (or TURN ON CAPS LOCK), and throw out your grammar book. Phone ringing? Let it go to voice mail and reply with a text message. Too busy to tell your close friends about a promotion? Post the news on Facebook. Have an idea? No need to think it over; just send out a tweet. And who really needs words anyway? LOL.
But embracing quick, cheap, and easy communication as the default way to cope in our hypercommunicating environment has serious downsides. Quick communication discourages reflection and thoughtfulness and is notoriously error prone; cheap communication provides little or no incentive to get the message right the first time; and easy communication has fooled us into thinking that interactions require little or no effort.
Productive and meaningful communication has never been easy. But adopting speed and convenience as guiding principles is degrading our communication and straining our relationships.
Building a productive and meaningful life requires effective interpersonal communication. Interpersonal communication takes the other person’s perspective into account and can be either one-on-one dialogue or interactions among a small number of people.10 Interpersonal communication is the foundation of our relational lives—it’s how we build our relationships—in a way that mass communication (sending tweets, giving presentations, composing Facebook posts, and otherwise broadcasting messages to more people than you can easily count) and personal communication (conversations that don’t take the other person’s perspective into account; monologues and self-expressive chatter) will never be.
Interpersonal communication is the focus of Stop Talking, Start Communicating because that’s where the action is. I can’t lecture my way into a good relationship with my boss or a key client; I build those productive bonds one interpersonal conversation at a time. I can’t PowerPoint my way into being a good husband, but meaningful conversations with my wife will eventually build up an interpersonal “body of work”—a goodwill account—that facilitates a strong marriage.
Unfortunately, the digital communication revolution has squeezed our interpersonal communication between large increases in personal communication on one side and mass communication on the other.
The interpersonal communication squeeze
Our new digital environment encourages personalized communication choices like never before. We can talk when we want, we can talk how we want, and we can talk on devices that cater to our sense of individuality. We can choose an insect ringtone, a disco ringtone, or whether our phone even rings at all. We can get a hot-pink tablet, a jet-black laptop, or a retro desktop computer. We can e-mail, call, and text at all hours. The individual is king of the digital universe, reinforcing an I-based approach to communication that squeezes the space for interpersonal communication, where we, not I, is sovereign.
It’s been a struggle for humans to move past their own wants and desires (I-based personal communication) and move toward consideration of another person’s perspective (we-based interpersonal communication) ever since we started interacting centuries ago. But it’s harder than ever today because we are pushing back against a relentless tide of powerful products that reinforce the I-based notion that communication is about what’s in it for me, on my terms. Let’s face it: we aren’t lining up at the crack of dawn to get our hands on the latest we-phone.
Interpersonal communication is also under pressure from the increase in mass communication facilitated by the digital revolution. New innovations, like social media, encourage mass communication because now it’s just as easy to post a message for 100 people as it is to send the message to a single person.
Yet convenient mass communication masks two fundamental communication realities: adding people always complicates an interaction, and interpersonal messages seldom scale up appropriately for an audience. Communication isn’t some new kind of personal app to run. It’s our primary tool for creating our lives. And effortless mass communication gives us the dangerous ability to inflict wide damage in mere seconds with our hasty words. It took me over 40 years to build my network, and it’s the only one I’ve got. Today, I can give it a negative jolt in seconds. I now have the asymmetrical power to, instantly and effortlessly, share a viewpoint, reveal a feeling, or post a picture on a social media site that would make everyone in my personal and professional network cringe. Or I can send an e-mail that I’ll regret to every contact in my address book.
Mass communication exposes our communication deficiencies for all to see. Before the digital revolution, bad communication habits were easier to conceal; the consequences of failed interactions were more limited, and it was simpler to recover from our errors. Our ancestors never had to worry that their mistakes would bounce around the endless echo chamber of the Internet. The village idiot used to be able to switch villages after saying or doing something stupid. We aren’t so lucky.
And we will have plenty of errors on display because communication is, and will always be, unpredictable, frequently difficult, and occasionally baffling. George Eliot pointed out almost 150 years ago that human interaction is even more complicated than chess because each piece on the human chessboard is alive with aspirations, emotions, and desires.11 Our knights, kings, and queens have minds of their own. The rooks like to endlessly talk over each other, and the pawns are busy texting the queen about trouble with the bishop. But the fact is that we love the crazy old queen, the unruly pawns, and the eccentric rooks—these are our people, this is our life. And we can learn how to improve our communication with all of them.
The three kinds of collateral damage from the digital communication revolution—the interpersonal squeeze, the embracing of speed and convenience in our interactions, and the inhospitable environment for meaningful communication—are hardly trivial. Unfortunately, they don’t represent the largest communication problem we face.
More often than I care to admit, I’m guilty of sending a text message, Facebook message, or e-mail to my wife … when she’s only a few steps away in another room. I sometimes pick the self-serve kiosk instead of the person behind the counter even when there’s no line in either place. And I frequently let calls go to voice mail and respond with a text message. I make these communication choices for two reasons: because I can, and because they are easy.
We have become prolific e-mailers, texters, and social media posters. We’ve so remarkably transformed our phones from devices for verbal communication to platforms for text messages and Internet surfing that some experts predict the death of the phone call; telecommunication companies are rapidly moving from voice-based to data-based subscription plans.12 A survey of our digital age communication preferences would reveal that for most of us, the majority of our daily communication is quick, expedient, and requires little skill—all attributes of what I call lower-order communication.
Lower-order communication is easy and convenient. Practices like sending quick, informational messages; firing off hasty replies; and posting self-expressive thoughts are behaviors that require little skill.
Lower-order communication happens more frequently in asynchronous modes of communication where there are lags between messages and responses, like e-mail, text messaging, social media, blogging, tweeting, and instant messaging (which, although it can shrink the time between responses, is still asynchronous). Asynchronous interactions are easier than synchronous interactions (where messages are sent and received in real time, like a face-to-face conversation or a phone call), because we choose when to respond to asynchronous messages and because we don’t have to integrate immediate feedback cues and other real-time information.
The digital communication revolution didn’t just make it easier to send and receive messages; it also encouraged easy (lower-order) communication. Dozens of times each day we pick quick and convenient ways to connect over interactions that would require more skill, time, or effort. Because we’re busy, and because we can, we take the fast and easy lower-order communication path.
Yet we haven’t relinquished our aspirations for higher-order communication. This disconnect is a major problem.
We want strong and productive relationships. We want to be considered a trusted and valued colleague. We want to come up with the right words when the stakes are high, and we want to effectively comfort or commiserate with a friend in need. These interpersonal aspirations require what I call higher-order communication.
Higher-order communication is characterized by thoughtfulness and deliberation; it’s harder than lower-order communication because it requires more time, greater competency, and effort. Higher-order communication includes skills like resolving conflict, solving problems, telling stories, arguing effectively, persuading, providing emotional support, generating sales, giving feedback, creating humor, bargaining, and negotiating.
Synchronous communication is usually higher-order because contemporaneous interactions require the constant integration of many verbal and nonverbal cues, like tone of voice and inflection, eye gaze, and facial expressions, and also because we are responding immediately. There is simply more communication “work” to do when an interaction happens in real time.
Higher-order communication involves difficult conversational competencies like trying to understand the other person’s perspective, grappling with emerging ideas to arrive at a mutual understanding, and scrambling to comprehend a conversation that’s changing with every sentence. Perhaps needless to say, higher-order communication is harder than the lower-order conversational alternative. Higher-order communication skills are more complicated and, consequently, more challenging to acquire, maintain, and improve. It’s easier to yell at two feuding coworkers to grow up (lower order) than it is to help them achieve a workable truce (higher order). Venting your frustrations to a supervisor (lower order) is easier than working with her to alleviate a lingering client problem (higher order). It’s easier to resort to cynicism or shock tactics to make your conversational partner laugh (lower order) than it is to say something legitimately funny (higher order). It’s easier to mumble an obligatory condolence (lower order) than it is to provide meaningful emotional support (higher order) to a grieving colleague, friend, or relative. It’s easier to fire off 10 quick replies to messages in your inbox (lower order) than it is to answer the eleventh message, which requires critical thinking and some kind of a decision (higher order).
Higher- and lower-order communication
Like other complex skills, higher-order communication competencies deteriorate when they aren’t used regularly.
I’m not saying that higher-order communication is always better than lower-order communication, or that asynchronous communication is bad and face-to-face communication is good. Plenty of messages can appropriately be handled quickly and easily, and it’s entirely possible to send productive messages through both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
The problem is that as the digital revolution unleashed gigantic amounts of information, we coped with the increased load by downshifting almost everything to the most expedient options, even when more thoughtful and deliberate responses were required. Lower-order communication has become the digital age norm, but we still have higher-order aspirations. The result is a growing disconnect between how we communicate (usually lower order) and what we expect our communication to accomplish (often higher order).
The gravest danger of the digital communication revolution is that our higher-order communication competencies are being eroded by ever-increasing amounts of lower-order communication.
The reason we feel like our communication skills have gotten worse in the past few years is because they have gotten worse. In essence, we are spending all day playing checkers, while our chess game slowly withers. Some researchers even worry that the underlying biological mechanisms that enable certain aspects of our higher-order communication, like the ability to make and synchronize eye contact and the ability to filter out background noise and tune in to our conversational partner, are in danger of deteriorating from lack of use.13
It takes deliberate practice—the cornerstone for developing any kind of expertise—to build and maintain higher-order communication skills and to remain effective in higher-order interaction modes like face-to-face and other synchronous conversations. Expertise also requires focused attention, a challenging precondition in our distraction-prone digital environments. Thanks to the innovations of the digital revolution and dozens of our daily communication choices, we’ve never been better at checkers. Unfortunately, our communication aspirations keep getting checkmated because the life we really want takes place on a human chessboard that turns out to be anything but quick, cheap, and easy.
But this is no sky-is-falling book. I wrote Stop Talking, Start Communicating because this is the best time in human history to be a competent communicator. We have remarkable new ways to connect with each other that our grandparents could never have imagined. It’s true that it’s also incredibly difficult to break free of the gravitational pull of distraction, expediency, self-expression, and excess that characterize so much digital age communication, but we are the masters of our powerful digital devices. We control our communication, and by strengthening our interpersonal communication skills, we can take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities to connect productively and meaningfully with each other.
Some of my advice may sound contrary to what you thought you knew about communication, but stick with me because these counterintuitive messages will help bring your communication competencies into alignment with your higher-order aspirations for your life. New thinking is required because our current methods of communicating aren’t working for us. More of the same old thinking will only increase the gap between the communication revolution’s potential and the reality we’re experiencing.
Each solution-focused chapter of Stop Talking, Start Communicating will improve your conversations and add tools to your communication toolkit. This book will help you develop the habits and skills necessary to convert unprecedented connectivity into more of the kinds of productive and meaningful connections you want.
Workable, enduring solutions to the problems of the digital era require a reevaluation of our communication and a sharp reduction in the practices that have caused the digital revolution—for all of its early promise—to make us yearn for the days before our devices stood between us.