We might be witnessing the next evolutionary step in language development – if so, it’s up to us to keep it interesting.
Picking up your phone to check it mid-conversation has almost become an acceptable faux pas, a very modern alternative of catching someone sneaking a peek. The offended party feels snubbed while the guilty screen addict, caught red-handed, either styles it out or gives an apologetic shrug.
Some meetings are opened with a “no phones please” announcement, but general etiquette is simply to leave your phone face down on the table – and resist the temptation to “Google that” instead of just talking to each other and working it out for yourselves.
The big irony for me is that while we’re compulsively snatching at our phones, we don’t use them to make calls. Instead we use them for text conversations – a further insulation from real interaction.
It’s pervasive. A thorny subject in all relationships. And I get in trouble for it just as much as everyone else. Some of it comes down to a lack of simple courtesy, but beyond that what it really shows is that we’re just not listening to each other properly. We shorten and channel communication through such a narrow lens that we lose many of the qualities of true communication.
Text you later: The slow decline of communication
The other symptom of this is that many people just don’t understand the nuances of situations. Things are served up for debate when we don’t have all the facts – and jumped on gleefully without pausing for thought. Look at the way politics are ‘discussed’ on Facebook, or the motivational epigrams we share on Instagram in the hope that people will conflate some Zen Master’s musings with our own pseudo-wisdom.
Avoiding a real understanding, or appropriating text and making it fit our needs has always been part of the way we willfully miscommunicate.
Growing up when and where I did, the divisions among the kids tended to be religious – Catholics vs. Protestants. If there was a scrape and some poor Protestant kid got duffed up, then a random Catholic kid would get a shoeing in retaliation, all in the name of “an eye for an eye.”
But of course, that’s not what it means. The saying really just means that the punishment should fit the crime, not that we should all go around with our chests puffed out quoting the Sean Connery’s “That’s The Chicago Way” speech from The Untouchables.
The simple fact is that when things are put down in writing, they’re open to interpretation. This is one of the great things about the richness and diversity of the English language, but it’s a shame that we dumb it down every day, slowly chipping away at authenticity and quality.
In the communications spectrum it’s all becoming one color – the combined auras of what we do and what we say – but it’s an increasingly bland one. We’ve got a chance to inject some vibrancy, some purple and paisley. If we do nothing it will just keep slowly turning grey.
