A friend texted me today asking for some help with the Adobe Flash publish settings for a website she and I are working on. I began to text my response then caught myself. How incredibly inefficient would it be for me to translate the text on my screen to clumsy finger taps on an iPhone keyboard!
Consider all the channels we have for communication today: email, text, Facebook, phone, in-person, chat clients, and handwritten notes at the very least. Now if I receive a message via any one of those channels, I’m most likely to respond via that channel as well. Why? Because we tend to “engage” with one channel at a time. When you check your email, you are “checking your email”. We say it as though we enter some magical email realm, from which we can only send and receive message via email. When you are “checking your email”, you are likely not texting or on the phone or engaging with any other channels. Even if you are, you are likely carrying on different conversations. Yet each conversation is usually isolated to one channel and that is exactly the tendency we need to drop.
I’m most likely to respond to an email via an email because when I read that email, I am “checking my email” and am in that magical mental state implies that all communication should be made via email. But each form of communication has its strengths and weaknesses and throughout a conversation, different needs arise. For example, my friend may request help with software settings via a text (as to not interrupt anything I’m doing), I might respond with an email (which allows me to send auxiliary data – in this case a screenshot), and she might finally follow up with a phone call (to troubleshoot).
Some of these transitions to other channels are made often and without much thought. But all too often, unconscious or poor selection of medium scrambles a message, leads to miscommunication, and wastes a lot of time. A common mistake is to attempt to relay an emotional message via text or email (mediums with very little emotional fidelity) instead of in-person or on the phone.
Every communication you make with another person is also a choice of medium. So next time you find yourself spending far too much time working out an issue with another person, ask yourself – did you choose the channel? Or did you let it choose itself?
PS: Has anyone ever seen a good list of the strengths and weaknesses of each channel? I started brainstorming one but want to know if others have made the attempt.
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Doth this website you be working happen to be the collaborative knowledge sharing we chatted about the other day? =)
Unfortunately not; its a far less game-changing project.
Glad you mentioned the knowledge-sharing site though. I was thinking about it today while running. I made an Earlez run today and called you, hoping to do a brainstorming session. I’m off for Redwood National Park Monday morning but perhaps when I get back, we can plot a bit more…
Right ideas.
I feel like textual communications allow me to formulate my thoughts into coherent sentences, thus allowing my recipient to believe more about my thought processes and the intelligence behind them. I enjoy writing because it gives me a faster chance to say what my tongue often flounders to communicate. (This eliminates texting, however, as my fingers and 160 characters don’t allow me to get across the full extent of my thoughts.) The major downfall to writing is that (without knowing the sender very very well) emotion is much harder to detect, in which sarcasm can be easily misconstrued as insult. In the case of emotionally-charged dialogues, vocal or face-to-face communication is highly necessary. I don’t know if this really goes along with your pros and cons list for mediums of communications, but that’s what I thought when I read this.
Is it the same as writing someone an email inviting them to meet up for coffee, or texting someone to ask them to call you? Those medium mix-ups are enough to throw anyone off balance.
That actually hints at several advantages of textual communication:
Though the stripping of emotion from writing can be seen as a disadvantage when that emotion is key to the message, it can also be a safeguard against replying too quickly and “emotionally” and conveying something you wish you had not. That extra delay in writing protects us from making those snappy replies we might make in person and regret later. It also gives us, as you mentioned, a chance to more carefully construct our words into a form that is easier for someone else to digest.