On Communication and Technology

I would like to talk about ambiguity in modern communication, because I genuinely do think that it is not really a consequence of, for example, texting per se. Texting is a perfectly valid form of quick communication, and it is enormously convenient. Basically it is the modern-day telegram, except it is massively better than a telegram. And the fact that we do use it to exchange banalities is the indicator that it is better than the telegram, because it is a marker of the efficiency of a form of communication that we are willing to use it for things other than emergencies. That is the sign that a technology has become good enough, reliable enough, and convenient enough that it has really come of age: when we start using it casually.




There was a time when phones were still becoming a thing, when there was a lot of hand-wringing over the fact that people were using phones to chat to each other! To just hold conversations! That is not what the phone is for, the phone is for emergencies! And so on. But again, the point at which you start swapping banalities with a technology is the point at which it has proven itself genuinely useful and reliable enough to be regarded as a mature technology.

And I do think texting is a valid form of communication. It, again, merely replaces the telegram just as email replaced the letter. And both newer technologies are fundamentally better, certainly in terms of convenience for the sender. And then, it can also wait for the recipient in their pocket for as long as they need it to, to give them time to finish whatever they were doing. This advantage bestowed on both sender and recipient is why a technology like texting has become such a successful form of communication in such a relatively short period of time. Similar principles apply in the case of email, obviously.

So I do not think that the problem is inherent in texting, although there are obviously limitations of expression inherent to it because - as with any form of writing - it is very difficult to convey the same nuances of meaning that you can with speech. But I would assert that even that is not entirely a problem inherent to texting, because part of the reason that the emotional nuances in speech are so easily-recognized is that we, instinctively, have built up over the years a base of intuitive knowledge on things like what a particular tone of voice means, what a particular change in pitch at a particular point in the sentence will tend to indicate about the speaker's intentions, etc. and we have this knowledge largely because we have been surrounded by speech all our lives.

Obviously, texts and emails can never have the same emotional range as speech, but I think they are capable of conveying a greater emotional range than they currently do because they are so new. It is only very recently that this stuff has become really commonplace. So no one has been able to be immersed in that form of communication for long enough that a basic vocabulary and grammar of subtext can be allowed to build up. We are stuck with the text and no subtext, no pun intended. Scratch that, I will embrace the pun. TEXT!

I like that idea because I think it does express on a small scale a larger idea that I have been considering about communication technologies and their relationship with social interaction in the modern day. It is not necessarily the communications technologies themselves that are inhibiting social interaction and effective social communication, it is the fact that technology has been changing so quickly - and we are in such a transitional stage with it - that it has rendered a great number of the old social protocols meaningless and/or obsolete. It has eliminated the old protocols of how you ask someone out, for example.

The problem with that as it currently stands is that, because it is such a young technology, a set of social protocols has not been given the chance to establish itself, and so essentially we have a new social grammar but, as yet, no vocabulary. As a society, we are stuck in this peculiar situation where there is a very definite medium for social communication but not enough time has elapsed - indeed not enough time can have elapsed by this point - to make it workable. We do not know how quickly this medium will be replaced - it could be very shortly, in which case a whole new set of protocols will have to begin development, and then the pattern repeats.

The basic question is whether these new communication forms - any of them - will sustain themselves for long enough to permit a fresh set of social protocols to not only emerge but to establish themselves in the culture. If and when that does happen, it will eliminate a lot of the ambiguities in communication, but until then we are rather stuck. It has, by necessity, eliminated the old social protocols before it has had time to put together an adequate plan to replace them, to shamelessly anthropomorphize a patently non-anthropomorphic system.