The growth of non-vocal communication

by rndn • 11 years ago

33 15 11 years ago

tubasaur• 11 years ago

From the tone of TFA, this seems to be presented as a problem. If that's the case, why is it a problem? Is written communication somehow inferior to verbal?

rrss1122• 11 years ago

I'd be interested in learning the reasons for this trend. Vocal communication seems more efficient than text. There's no pauses between what you say and what the other person says.

I wonder if that could be a reason for the decline of speaking on the phone...

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

Both can be efficient. In text, in some mediums, you and the other person can talk in parallel, which is quite challenging (and unconventional/"impolite" even if possible) in verbal communication. You don't need to wait for a break in the conversation; what you say gets processed in a queue-like fashion by others listening. For that matter, I've been on active IRC channels before where many people are holding several different conversations simultaneously, and nobody considers that rude; that's not really possible in verbal communication.

On the other hand, people can be unnecessarily verbose and circumlocutory in text (especially email, as opposed to IM or similar), while in voice you can more easily push for directness.

ekanes• 11 years ago

The biggest benefit of text is that it's asynchronous. We can converse by email/text/etc without having to sync up when we're both free at the same time.

civilian• 11 years ago

It's not more efficient if the other person is just rambling at you.

As someone who's a good listener and doesn't like to interrupt people, this is a great reason to have digital communication. I can ignore your blathering. If we're doing an IRL 1:1 I'm going to slowly get more frustrated at your run-on thoughts.

If anyone has any tips for how to convey "Yes, I got the message, move on to the next thing you were going to say or stop talking." firmly & diplomatically, I'd love to hear it. It's been a lifelong struggle.

alexashka• 11 years ago

You're basically people-pleasing.

This is because you don't have the ability to replace the people you feel the need to please at your expense, with people you can have a reciprocal relationship with.

I'd say people are in this situation to some extent (and most people their whole lives, let's be honest :)) until they get high enough in their career and maturity to have enough power to have others cater to them and not vice versa.

Not cater in the sense that you abuse them and they can't abuse you but in terms of you having the wisdom to establish largely mutually-beneficial relationships and cut out the ones that aren't - win-win.

I'd say almost nobody younger than 30 has the ability or the wisdom to do this. As long as you are learning and becoming more and more independent, both financially and 'spiritually', then it'll be fine in due time.

If you're not doing that, you most likely bitch and moan to others as means of therapy and guess what, they don't wanna hear it either, they're thinking 'yes I got the message, move on', except you can't move on because you're not moving anywhere really :)

ps. What most people do is limit the amount of interaction they have with one another - you bitch to me for an hour a week and I bitch to you a similar amount. That way we both get to de-stress while not overwhelming one another. :P

lotsofpulp• 11 years ago

I find the biggest advantage of text is for record keeping. People always think their memory is better than it really is, and I love being able to avoid he said she saids by pointing to an email. Especially in business.

6d0debc071• 11 years ago

Vocal communication seems more efficient than text.

It can be faster, but you're potentially trading clarity and ease of reference - among other things - to get that speed. For example, it's not necessarily very useful for me to sit someone down and talk to them them an hour or so in response to a question on some complex issue, as compared to sending them an email they can read at their leisure and hop around in for reference.

moneytide• 11 years ago

Theres a reason that a common depiction of an alien is hairless humanoid without a mouth. Devolve the traits that are no longer necessary.

jasode• 11 years ago

I probably do 1/10th the amount of phone calls than 15 years ago. Overall, the trend of less communication by speech has improved my overall quality of life.

That said, the advantages of text-vs-talk depends on the relationship.

There are certain people that I prefer to keep in 100% text mode. When they call, their chats have little substance. My mind wanders and I wish they would get to the point. Since most can't touch type, if they are forced to communicate by email or SMS text, they are succinct and get to the point!. Technology is a beautiful thing.

But there are also others who I wish I had more frequent chats with. They have humour that makes me laugh and their upbeat tone doesn't translate into text. But they are busy with families, etc and so we've settled into twice-a-year catch up sessions.

Overall, I still prefer text over speech. I remember that there were old articles decades ago lamenting that "we used to write long form letters to each other and the new fangled phone has killed that off." Back then, there was a value judgement in that letters were somehow "better" than phones.

Sven7• 11 years ago

The amount of time it took to get a letter across the country/world also made a difference to their signal to noise ratio. It especially comes across in the letters written by thoughtful people.

You could compare it to speech making or say a TED talk. The speaker knows she has one shot to make a mark, so a lot more effort goes into it. And it ends up leaving a mark.

pshc• 11 years ago

If you're going to monologue, I'll take a blog post over a speech any day. But if we need to work out details, let's get conference chairs. If we're planning a party, online will do. Once we're hanging out, we'd better be in the same room.

So long as you get out enough, I think this is fine. When you're doing something rational, online written communication is great--you omit all those distracting interpersonal protocols and focus on the issue at hand.

ineedtosleep• 11 years ago

From personal experience as someone who's had a computer since around 8 years old (and is nearing 30), I have to say that I've learned to speak more confidently, especially in less-than-ideal situations; however, I will always be able to communicate better through text.

I've noticed this is mostly the trend with people around my age as we were raised during the era where instant messaging blew up. Nearly all of my extremely intense, extra personal conversations with my friends (who I have known since elementary/middle school) were through IM. Part of me thinks this was due to SMS costs being extremely high, but I digress.

When we hang out in person, it was only to talk about school, video games, cartoons, jokes, etc., but when it came time to air out the overstuffed emotional closet, it was always through IM. Sure, it would sometimes bleed over to the "physical" world and much more detail would come out through actual physical interaction, but the conversations would always start with text on a screen.

That said, I feel that actual speech has sort of become a facade to actual "conversation". Especially in cases where one's in an unfamiliar environment (meeting someone new, attempting to speak in a different mode of speech, etc.), we all seem to just recite a script as if it's a weird vocal handshake to show that you're a normal human being. Conversations through text removes so much of the external factors that just increase noise and I believe it's a much purer, higher quality form of conversation.

[Sorry, that became kind of ranty. This was part of an enjoyable paper I wrote during undergrad.]

socceroos• 11 years ago

I think that the primary effect of eConversations is that you get closer to the brain's raw consciousness. You skip past the social lessons you learnt as a child and go straight to a stream from the brain. It's far more volatile.

'Pure', in this context, takes a slightly different form.

dstyrb• 11 years ago

Why are half of the charts missing axis labels?

Figure 1 is completely non-essential and just repeats the prior sentence in huge text.

Figure 2 I guess is "percentage of people doing once per day" from the following sentence, which does not reference the chart and uses different numbers than the chart.

Figure 3 pyramid plot seems like a fairly suboptimal visualization choice usually reserved for abstract hierarchies like human needs, not for trends and percentages because it has no numeric information.

Figure 4 should read "Total Number of Worldwide Internet Users (In Billions)", the growth would be the derivative of this plot (which actually would have some cool features from 2013-2015 and 2005-2009 that I would be interested in knowing about).

Nothing is technically wrong with Figure 5, however I immediately question numbers like 71,727,551, rounding them is more professional. Also a nice touch would be to have the names drawn on the pie slices, instead of using a legend.

No clue what Figure 6 means. In the world? In the USA? In a specific age group? The next sentence talks about Millenials...

Most of the time the text has little or nothing to do with the associated graphic.

The growth of non-vocal communication

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