The Perfect Response | EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

[We are so deep into the digital age that we may not notice that a norm of mediated interpersonal exchange has replaced the direct contact humans in all earlier generations experienced. The norm now is to connect by phone or text–a degrading of the idea of contact that we may hardly notice. The issue is not whether there is usefulness in smart phone technology. There surely is. It is whether we have taken away one of the key elements required for gaining a degree of social intelligence.]

For those of us who study human communication, direct face to face conversation is usually the fundamental model for understanding all other forms. When two or more people are in the same space addressing each other, their exchanges are likely to contain all of the critical yardsticks for measuring successful interaction. These essential processes include awareness of the other, the potential for immediate and unfiltered reciprocity in an exchange, and access to all the visual and verbal feedback that comes with direct person-to-person contact. All other channels of communication—including the devices that extend the range of human connectivity—alter or diminish one or more of one of these processes. And though it may not seem like it, altering or reducing a conversational asset is a big deal.

Until the advent of widespread electric telegraphy in the 1850s direct communication with another in the same space has always anchored human communities. The very idea of a sociology of human relationships is mostly predicated on the expectation that we have direct and real-time access to each other.

Even so, the default model for understanding how we maintain our social nature is increasingly at odds with the ways we now live. What has changed most dramatically are the preferences of younger Americans who are less eager to seek out conversation as a problem-solving tool.

We are kidding ourselves if we believe the false equivalency that lets “social media” substitute for living in the social world.

The most interesting research on this subject is from Sherry Turkle at M.I.T., who has been documenting the well-known drift of the young away from direct interaction to alternate channels that enlarge connectivity but diminish communication richness (Reclaiming Conversation, 2015). The platforms are well-known, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other forms. Under the misnomer of “connectivity,” changes in technology and adjustments to them are slowly schooling younger generations to prefer communication that is mediated and intentionally isolating. We are kidding ourselves if we believe the false equivalency that lets “social media” substitute for living in the social world.

Turkle has noted a wholesale flight away from direct conversation and toward electronic messaging. In the words of many of her interviewees, meeting directly with someone is “risky,” “too emotional,” “an interruption,” and “anxiety producing.” As a high school senior she interviewed observed, “What’s wrong with conversation? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation! It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you are going to say.”

Responses like these suggest a desire to escape the burdens of acquiring the essential rudiments of what psychologists sometimes call “social intelligence,” meaning the ability to navigate through many essential and unavoidable relationships that unfold in real time.

It has always been true that some conversations are difficult. But this kind of face-work is also the essential work of a complex adult life. As Turkle notes,

Many of the things we all struggle with in love and work can be helped by conversation. Without conversation, studies show that we are less empathic, less connected, less creative and fulfilled. We are diminished, in retreat. But to generations that grew up using their phones to text and messages, these studies may be describing losses they don’t feel. They didn’t grow up with a lot of face-to-face talk.

Of course there is always a risk among the old to assume that progress has been overtaken by regression. To paraphrase the Oscar Hammerstein lyric from Oklahoma!, it’s easy to believe that “things have gone about as far as they can go.” Even so, it’s worth remembering that forms of mediated communication are usually not additive, but reductive. Texts, e-mails, and even video games start with various fundamentals of communication, but almost always take something away. It may be immediacy. It may be full interactivity. But the most consequential of all is a reduced intimacy that happens when humans are not in the same space breathing the same air.

No locution is easier to make than one that includes a statement of doubt. There are inherent personal advantages to assertions that things are not as they seem.

One source of our predicament as a country is our polarization, fueled mostly by doubters of various sorts with suspicions about the institutions in their lives: the fairness of voting systems, the intentions of professionals involved in education and childcare, or maybe the offerings of universities presenting courses thought to be useless.

To any observer it looks like we have become a nation of cynics and sceptics, leaving millions of teachers, election workers, city leaders and clinical experts struggling to assert what was once a given: acceptance of their knowledge, legitimacy and good will. This is not a wholly new pattern. After all, Richard Hofstadter’s legendary Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was published in 1963. A pattern of ill-founded “truths” was well known then. But ill-informed assertions are now common, and more easily proliferate.

What’s going on? Why are our friends and neighbors willing to doubt the expertise and intentions of so many professionals and public servants?

At least a partial explanation seems to be this: No locution is easier to make than one that includes a statement of doubt. There are inherent personal advantages to assertions that things are not as they seem. First, they seem to be the safest and most comfortable of all responses to an admittedly complex world that cannot be fully understood. To say that “elections are rigged,” or “banks exploit their customers,” or “too many teachers are indoctrinating their students” is to offer an opinion that, presumably has some weight of experience or evidence behind it. By contrast, to simply affirm what seems like an expected state of affairs (i.e., “the city is making a valiant effort to curb crime,” “Women make up an important segment of the military”) asserts a more routine status quo. But to offer a negative judgment or opinion is subtly ego-enhancing. It suggests deeper understandings about accepted truths. “Things are not going well” or “things are not what they seem” are the kinds of statements that carry a presumption of awareness and knowledge. There’s drama and intellectual chaos in the denial of another’s accepted truth.

To make such an accusation is to confer on oneself a much-needed sense of agency.

Second, ersatz accusations allow a kind of rhetorical covering that skips the due diligence of learning in favor of the appearance of a contrary judgment. This rhetorical form also has the advantage of trying to buy us off with a kind of faux-expertise that can mask a sagging ego, or a sense of powerlessness. For example, if a person does not want to take the time to read about vaccine safety, why not convert some free-floating displeasure into direct dissatisfactions that can be passed off as insights? The easy targets of this scapegoating can be the drug industry, perhaps, or public health officials, or anyone with a rightful claim to special expertise. Similarly, if a person doesn’t like a vote tally that will keep a preferred candidate out of office, why not soften the sting of defeat with charges that the election was a “fraud?” To make such an accusation is to confer a much-needed sense of agency on oneself, gaining more standing as an accuser than as a person bound by the facts as they are. In other words, if one’s life is not unfolding in positive ways, why not cast out some of that displeasure by making accusations about others? In our times, the resulting press attention can be sources of satisfaction.

Small Minds Thrive on Personalization

It is a malady of our time that many do not exert the intellectual energy needed to understand the structural and institutional forces of contemporary life; but they are certain they can ‘know’ the nefarious intentions of others. It is easier to make an outrageous assertion about an individual than to weigh the effects of a given policy. Small minds thrive on personalization.

This kind of scapegoating logic is the only way I can wrap my head around outrageous and false accusations made against others, for example: suggesting widespread the “grooming” of children by librarians and educators to induce premature sexual or gender activity. A charge hinting at something like child abuse is sure to get attention. But in our age, and for the many who will not seek out customary routes to certain knowledge, fantasies of professional malfeasance are revealing markers. Accusers who make these kinds of claims strive for the unearned honor of “knowing” more than the rest of us.