This follows up on Frank Forencich's talk about communcation. He believes (and basic hunter-gatherer history shows) that people have evolved for face-to-face communication. Frank talked about how people can pick up on very small nonverbal gestures during communication for example.
This got me to thinking about how all of the electronic communication of today may be affecting people. Frank said that without in-person communication, a person's level of empathy may drop, as they are not communicating in the way humans evolved to do.
From that, I would then propose a hierarchy of sorts as to what is the most beneficial types of communication in terms of health:
- In-person talking
- Video chat
- Talking on the telephone
- Texting
As you move down the scale, you need less and less of your perceptive abilities when communicating.
This also helped me to connect to an earlier post I did on teens waiting longer and longer to get their drivers licenses today. They seem less motivated to go out and physically interact with others. Instead, they communicate electronically. Or as one researcher put it, "they satisfy their basic human desire to connect through electronic means".
Now I can legitimately question whether they are satisfying their needs in this area. Just as a person can satisfy their desire for food by eating junk food (which obviously isn't healthy), they can, in a similar way, satisfy their need to belong by using "junk food communication".
Talking to live people is what we are designed to do!
Sadly….my communication with my kids is mostly through text messages….on the even sadder flip side….they mostly talk only through texts with their friends.
I strongly believe my business well being is due to my relentless effort to talk to people.Everybody emails…few talk anymore. I make it a priority in my professional life.
Marc
You don’t provide any evidence that people have evolved for face-to-face communication. In fact voices probably suggest otherwise. What need would there be to verbalize language if we could always see the other person?
Many studies lately have been popping up on the benefits of being introverted. A greater ability to focus and concentrate… Higher productivity. Not that I buy all of these but again this seems to contradict your thesis.
What if I told you that I recently did an analysis of language usage amongst different forms of communication and found that, perhaps what you would think is sadly, the form of communication that is closest to real life speaking, is twitter… Not email or chat or books.
Human beings evolve. In the amount of time it would take to call up 10 people or find them face-to-face I can send email to them all, order a pizza, eat the pizza, take a shit and watch Terminator 2(The best one of the series of course). Please tell me how face-to-face communication has any advantage.
Finally, you are using a f$^&@! blog not speaking about these things with friends so how is that for hypocrisy?
Yes, I get the irony of blogging about the value of benefits of face-to-face communication. It was obvious, though I was waiting for someone to point it out.
This point is why I will be taking the blog in a different direction soon.
As for evidence, I am just getting into it. Frank Forencich knows more about the evidence than I do.
Face-to-face is less efficient, YES. But that doesn’t mean it is bad. And it doesn’t mean that electronic communication is healthier. Obviously, I think it’s the reverse.