Communication in a Technological World
Posted on 12. Mar, 2010 by Jonathan Pichot in Feature
The way we communicate is central to the way we live. What we do not often understand is how the way we communicate affects us. With the birth of the internet, and the subsequent rush of telecommunication innovation, the way most people communicate today is vastly different from even a decade ago. Remember, Facebook, or Twitter, or Skype did not even exist in the year 2000.
Think about the way you learn about other people. With our Facebook Newsfeed, we now know bits of information about our friends (or acquaintances) that before, this friend would have had to tell us. We can peruse pictures of special moments in other people’s lives whom we barely know. It is a strange new world. What affect does these new voyeuristic habits have on us? Does it really improve our friendships, or does it only give us less things to talk about when we do meet face to face? If my friends already know what I did last weekend, have I lost the pleasure of telling them myself?
New forms of face-to-face interaction are growing out of this technology. Now, it is not uncommon to reference our digital lives in real life. We ask whether our friend has seen the newest viral video on another person’s wall, new relationship gossip spreads quickly, we share a laugh at a friend’s wall post. It is important to remember is that all these interactions are products of engineering decisions made by the creators of these technologies. The entire concept of the ‘wall’ is an engineering decision. But what exactly is the real world equivalent of the ‘wall’? It is like having a conversation with a friend by shouting at each other in a room with all your other friends. That is not a particularly pleasant type of interaction. And what does the like button mean? What value is it to me to know that the girl I met one summer in France likes the fact that I recently rediscovered my love for the Beatles? There is a small bit of communication going on here, but does it really enhance the quality of my relationship?
An important fact of our connected world is that we cannot disconnect. All the advancements in technology are built on the assumption that we want more connection, not less. The internet has moved from the office, to the home, to my phone. With the Internet has come the ability to be persistently connected. Instant messaging services broadcast the fact that you are available. But do I always want to know whom I can talk to at any given moment? At least with the telephone, you did not know whether the person you were calling was available or not. Now with the little green dot on Skype, you know that that person is instantly accessible. What an oppressive little green dot. I know I could call home, and my dad would likely pick up the phone. I do not need to be reminded that he is available. That green dot, that reminder of connection, is convenient, but it is also oppressive because it forces us to know who is sitting on their computers, a double-click away from a conversation. We have conquered distance with our technology, but in the process, we have lost solitude.
Our technologies also place limits on what we can say and how we can say it. Texting and instant messaging do not encourage long, thoughtful conversations. They are emotionally sterile mediums. We have had to invent emoticons and abbreviations to give them some sort of human emotion, but even then, sarcasm and intonation are often misread. If you have ever had to clarify yourself on IM, you understand the problem. We talk to each other much more than before, but do we actually know each other better? The internet has encouraged an explosion of writing, some of it good, most of it bad. What we have not yet invented is an effective way of sifting through all this information to find what is valuable. We feel like we know more about the world and each other, but most of this information is superficial. An IM conversation can never replace the depth of a face-to-face interaction simply because of the limits of the technology.
Communication is a human need. The impulse to create all these new ways of speaking to one another is natural. The satisfaction of a good conversation, where those involved feel heard and understood and where real relationships are made, is a fundamental human joy. But we need to be aware of how our technology can help and hinder this deep communication. We only have so much time in this world, and so we should be concerned with whether the tools we’ve invented to bring us closer together might actually be keeping us apart.
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