Jim interrupts a meaningful moment with his kids to respond to a trivial text message; Sarah hits reply all on a sensitive email message, upsetting dozens of colleagues; Bill’s phone vibrates throughout his anniversary dinner, causing him to lose his train of thought (he was saying something about love, happiness, something…); and Lynn can’t adequately focus on her boss’s instructions because new messages keep chiming in on her computer.
These distortions are symptoms of a major underlying problem: How we can communicate with each other has raced ahead of how we should communicate with each other. Our powerful digital communication tools are damaging our vital person-to-person communication skills.
Meaningful communication—the very lifeblood of civilization—is in danger as advances in digital connectivity have facilitated quick, cheap, and easy modes of communication at the expense of more thoughtful and meaningful dialog.
The very devices that allow people to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time also encourage hasty interactions that trade speed for quality, confuse self-expression with shared communication, and create a level of constant distraction and scattered activity that multiplies conversational errors.
A daily tally of our communication—emails, texts, calls, face-to-face conversations, social media interactions, and so on—would reveal that the vast majority of our communication is of the quick, cheap, and easy variety. And the research literature on habits and preferences shows convincingly that what we have done most frequently and most recently heavily influence the habits we accumulate. We are laying down quick, cheap, and easy communication habits, and the consequences of our expedient preferences are becoming increasingly clear.
Quick communication discourages reflection and thoughtfulness; cheap communication provides no incentive to get our words right the first time; and easy communication has fooled us into thinking that communication doesn’t require much effort.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see why quick, cheap, and easy became our communication default. The digital revolution unleashed gigantic amounts of information and enabled breathtaking volumes of communication. We needed a way to cope with the increased load, so we began downshifting to the quickest, cheapest, and easiest ways to communicate. A face-to-face conversation downshifts to a phone call, which downshifts to an email, which downshifts to a 160-character text message.
Quite unintentionally, the quick, cheap, and easy ways of communicating that are the hallmarks of our current digital age are eroding the higher-order communication skills that we need more than ever to succeed in a complicated and rapidly changing world. We are getting better and better at firing off shorter and simpler messages at the very time when our communication should be getting deeper and more sophisticated to meet the increasingly complex and sensitive issues we are facing at work, at home, and in our communities.
The very real advances of our digital communication technologies mask a disconcerting truth: We have engineered an incredibly inhospitable environment—full of trivial distractions and pointless hyperactivity—for meaningful communication.
But thoughtful, meaningful connections in the digital age are still possible when we practice some enduring communication principles (which we will discuss in the weeks ahead). And when we get our principles right, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that meaningful communication flourishes. After all, it was the universal desire for meaningful human connections that fueled the digital communication revolution in the first place.