Up until 1990 the traditional phone was the equivalent of e-mail, and employees were always being told to hang up and have meetings. Now if you get a voice contact, it’s cause for celebration. In the age of smart phones, human contact is a lost art. But it’s still king because it engages all aspects of our ability to access information and make informed decisions.
Yes, technology has expanded our network of relationships. People brag about how many friends they have on Facebook or the size of their network on LinkedIn. Yes, technology has expanded our capacity to communicate in writing. Twitter has made communication almost ubiquitous and omnipresent. Yes, technology allows our thoughts to be transmitted instantaneously at the speed of our wireless networks. It’s easy. It’s seemingly efficient.
Problem: With less physical data to interpret because of the heavy use of digital communication, more and more communication problems are arising between people.
Psychology Today did a great piece about a social psychologist and Northwestern University law professor named Janice Nadler, who paired Northwestern law students with those from Duke University and asked each pair to agree on the purchase of a car:
Researchers instructed each team to bargain entirely through e-mail, but half the subjects were secretly told to precede the negotiation with a brief getting-to-know-you chat on the phone. The results were dramatic: Negotiators who first chatted by phone were more than four times likelier to reach an agreement than those who used only e-mail. In the study, which appeared in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, subjects who never spoke were not only more likely to hit an impasse, but they often felt resentful and angry about the negotiation.
That reminds me of the famous New Yorker cartoon that shows a dog sitting on a chair in front of a computer. He turns to his doggie friend sitting on the floor and says: “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
Lets have a reality check: face-to-face relationship-building deflects the possibility for miscommunications and misunderstandings. Period. But electronically, you can’t hear people’s voices, which clues you in to a lot of things. You don’t know how they are receiving your words or even when they are getting your message in physical-time reality. You can’t assess their body language or observe their responses. In business especially, the sense of professional “intimacy” we depend on is, at best, only utilizing 10 percent of our communication cues, tools and competencies. The more we rely on e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and texting as our primary ways of communicating, the less likely we are to be known by those with whom we are interdependent for our success.
Okay, I use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and am connected to my iPhone throughout the day to text and check e-mail. I communicate through blogging and other social media. But there comes a time when I have to realize that my relationships are suffering; a reminder for me to stop tweeting and texting and pick up the phone! And if you live locally, do yourself a favor, give someone you haven’t talked to in a while a quick text message and invite him to dinner.
Source: Debbie Robins in The Huffington Post
