The lost art of communication

In today’s technologically-advanced world, every dot-com enterprise out there – that isn’t trying to sell you cheap tits for a monthly fee (and even a few that are) – boasts greater interpersonal communication. From social networking sites to business directories, from instant messaging to internet phones, all of them claim to improve communications between the billions of people inhabiting this ever shrinking planet.

They are doomed to failure, for the very fact that they are trying to over-simplify human communication. Face-to-face meetings provide such a wealth of information to the brain that there is little room for misinterpretation. From body-language to inflection, the choice of words to the emotion conveyed in the eyes of the speaker, the human brain is inundated with signs and signals to interpret, all of which complement and contextualise the others, resulting in a highly complex, but ultimately very thorough picture of what is intended to be conveyed.

All these technological developments add to the ways in which we can NOT communicate with one another effectively. The problems are nigh endless. From the first couriered letters and telegrams of old (Galipoli, anyone?), right through to modern text messaging (oh, I beg your pardon, ‘txt msgs’), communication is highly fallible when not accompanied by visual signatures. Sure, you can add a smiley or a ‘lol’ to convey your emotion, but it is in such a dilute and impersonal, generic form, that it means very little to the recipient. It is almost as though it is part of the punctuation, but with less gramatical impact, seeing as punctuation has been all but eradicated these days anyway.

Whilst phone conversations retain the information of the tone of voice and inflection, these too can often be misinterpreted if not accompanied by visual contextual reinforcement. For instance, sardonic wit can often carry across as snappy or defensive, when in actual fact it was delivered with a smirk and the brightest of dispositions.

Whilst vastly limited in terms of informational content (often by the number of characters – lets remember, after all, text messaging was originally a SECONDARY feature of the mobile phone, for when you had only a short, non-urgent message which could be briefly and clearly expressed in a few short sentences), this is far from the ONLY drawback of these new technologies. Connectivity is the other main problem with these services. Who hasn’t received a text message until days, even weeks, after it was sent? How familiar are the words “*some text missing*”? And how often does one find oneself pressed to a window or standing balanced on one leg in the middle of a field trying in vain to retain sufficeint mobile coverage to not only send a message, but receive a reply and hold something that vaguely resembles a conversation? Furthermore, the internet is far from infallible in terms of IM connectivity; video calls and social networking boards also suffer from server failures, download limits and network connectivity issues.

All told, whilst the methods of communication were far fewer in the past, communication was almost certainly more effective when it did occur. lmfao @ tht