Communicating in Sound Bytes
The way we communicate has changed so much in just the past few years. From my perspective, these changes are doing damage to personal relationships.
With Internet pop-up advertisements and the popularity of social networking, particularly Twitter and Facebook postings with their character limitations, it seems that our brains have been “trained” to assess communication in 10 seconds or less. This may be okay with pop-up advertisements, but it can be disastrous in personal relationships.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that in so many of my personal interactions with busy people, they listen for the first six seconds and then zone out or move on to some other thought that pops into their head, like a pop-up ad on their screen. The damage to personal relationships enters when a person is trying to communicate something that is very important or intimate to him or her, or when he or she is trying to verbally sort through feelings with a close friend. To fail to fully hear the person out and cut them off with a response that cannot possibly take into consideration all the details left unsaid, is to communicate loud and clear, “I don’t care what you were going to say. I don’t have time for you. I don’t care about you.” As you can imagine in this scenario, the person trying to share intimate details, personal challenges, or some other important matter is not likely to try to communicate very many more times with the individual who fails to hear him or her out.
This is especially problematic for people like my friend who often pauses in the middle of a sentence to break eye contact, look up at no particular spot in a contemplative gaze, and gather her thoughts before finishing her sentence. I wonder if anyone in her life ever hears a complete sentence from her, much less a whole paragraph of thoughts. And I wonder how that makes her feel.
For years my communication style has been to lay the foundation of what I’m about to talk about, give the points in support of the issue, explain the issue, address possible disadvantages, and then request feedback. It’s a system. It isn’t perfect, but because I’m a non-linear thinker, it helps me to stay on point. In the last few years, though, I’ve noticed that in many of my interactions, I’ve lost the other person before I even get to the explanation of the issue! Before completing the thought, he or she responds with half-baked answers that are often miles from the mark of relevance. It seems that many interactions of this quality happen with people under age 30. So, I have a choice. I can surround myself with people of my generation, who remember how to communicate the way we did before Twitter, or I can learn to speak in concise sound bytes and use “teasers” that are like twitter headlines that entice the person to listen a little longer.
I’m going to try to learn to communicate all over again. I hope my friends will understand what remains unsaid.
I’d love to hear your communication tips.
Rhonda Sciortino