Five Reasons Why Digital Communications Hurts Society
70% of communication is non verbal.
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Five Reasons Why The Digital Age Is Destroying Communication
This post starts very defensively: I'm posting two book covers of my texts on digital communications that have sold less than 500 copies. Combined.
What course do I teach? Oh, right, marketing. But my point is that I am not an ageing Luddite, and I am not anti-digital.
I am only aware of opportunity cost and the dangers of persisting in ‘communication’ that does not involve people speaking together in the same space where they are porting their skin suits and full biological apparatuses. I am promoting the importance of still having a conversation and not running any operations where employees never talk face to face and only offer up bursts of digital verbiage and then wait for responses.
Many have written about the dangers of social media, the tribalism it brings, the linear relationship between the advent and growth of social media and the growth in teenage girl suicide/self-harm and reported feelings of racial oppression, and the fact that social media exploits and adapts to our every psychological weakness in an insatiable, inhuman quest for our attention just because it wants to sell us stuff.
Or we could discuss what happens if they tweak the algorithm a little like TikTok has done with the Gaza situation. They can make it so that one generation believes something at double the rate of a much more informed generation. This might offend some, but if TikTok is your major source of news, it automatically takes you off the register of the informed.
My problem with digital communication, primarily email and texting, is that it removes the bulk of what comprises communication. Someone clever in a textbook - I am too lazy to source - noted that communication was seventy per cent nonverbal. If that is true, using email as one’s primary means of communication is like trading your car in for a bike. The metaphor isn’t perfect, but email and texting are shit communication.
Why?
Keyboard warriors -Imagine you went to someone at work, and someone emailed you to say, “Excuse me, sir, yes sir, I filed a complaint against you via a super secret link on the corporate website. “I said that you were a racist, an Islamophobe and a potential danger to society because you repeated a rumour that insinuated that my lunch, when heated, creates such a stink it makes Febreze cans develop legs and run away.”
“And I recommended that you be fired because it hurts my feelings, and I am not white.”
Now that hate crime has moved from incitement to violence to someone identifying as having hurt feelings, this is quite relevant. For this analogy, we will assume that the complainer failed to file a Human Rights Complaint.
Human Rights Tribunals form their justice based on a complicated mix: the assessment of the colour of your socks, your height, the last time you played Rush, your eye colour, and that day’s temperature in Vulcan, AB.) and your victimhood scorecard.
My friend Tova O’Shitte said that this is not an accurate assessment of how human rights counsellors work.
She said they also consider whether you can hold a tan.
My friend Hamish Fry said, “Why don’t you talk about it and forget all the emails, forms and paperwork.”
He was immediately fired and told to stop bringing his “I was born in 1965 ethics.”
However, the problem with solving problems with only digital means is that a human element is missing. There is no interpretation of tone, body posture, intonation, even the degree of eye contact, or the way you sit in your chair. Yes, that stuff is more important than the words. And in the email, it’s all missing.
We simply say things in email that we would never say to someone’s face. I’m not talking about the lovelorn late-night drunk love confessions that still often come out face to face; I’m talking about the anger, the proclamations, the coldness, the fact that you don’t get any interpretation of the impact of the words you are having on the person, we have all heard about keyboard warriors. I know I have let fly a few rants in emails I would never have said in person, and all it’s ever done is get me in trouble.
The walkaway advantage—When you ask someone a question in person, it’s rude for the respondent to start watching TikTok and walk away. But that is the advantage of email; people don’t have to say no anymore; they just don’t respond.
But if you send the email with the question again and get some wild idea that you will persist until you get an answer, you can be banned for harassment. I hired a babysitter years ago; she was down on her luck and nice enough; she was our landlord’s daughter, and her last job was cleaning puke from school buses. It turns out that she was, as I paid her, going through our mail and personal effects, taking pictures, and when we did a spring clean, she went through our garbage and texted her mother pictures of everything. You have to be careful about tenants tossing old mattresses. A whole crime unit is dedicated to such crimes - when they aren’t on coffee runs for Antifa.
Our ex-babysitter had to ensure we weren’t throwing away her mother’s pee-stained mattress. In an email, I called that girl a “fat person with porcine qualities,” in a slightly different phrasing, and her father and mother were cops. Some idiot cop ended up calling me up to tell me that he would arrest me for criminal harassment. I said there was this new thing in email called the spam blocker and that one email was hardly a pattern. I blocked him. So I walked away.
But the walk-away does more than help me not be bothered by sycophant cops who meet a big-city detective whose eyes go all moist. It helps destroy relationships, leaving many people frustrated and giving them a bad taste. It allows petty tyrants to exhaust employees and get away with much more than they would have if they had to meet face-to-face. It fractures relationships. It is plastic, stiff, and unbending. Nothing is as good as the old face-to-face.
Time waster, especially at academic or government departments, but it does create many new hires!
If you work for a big corporation, all communication may turn into a monotone hum; it is the danger of over-copying people. At my university, I finally told someone that when he had questions, he did not have to send the message to all 500 faculty members, and he did not need to query us all about whether the new plagiarism detector could detect Chat GBT. (The answer was it does not, but we say it can.)
Too much email turns us into dull, skimming creatures where nothing registers. It also allows many senior government and academic managers to spend their entire day deleting emails they don't read and attending useless meetings where the big event is when they get one of the Apple crullers before Fat Ted does his hover-and-gorge routine.
Superficial relationships—Digital creates many weak-tie relationships; it meets enough of our social needs that we never feel obligated to meet people face-to-face. Indeed, face-to-face communication has dropped 40% since the 1970s, keeping us at home. But as social creatures, we are wired to be together, to look one another in the eye.