Juggling face-to-face and electronic conversations rarely results in better communication, and in doing it, we break an implicit promise.
Alone Together
Much of what follows I owe to a friend, George Brandie, but I've been there myself. It's about the gadgets we use to supposedly communicate better, but which actually isolate us.
George had a "conversation" with a guy who had a WiFi PDA on the table in front of him. Every couple of minutes the guy, still talking to George, would check the PDA screen and often tap out a line or two on its tiny "thumb-board."
When checking the screen or tapping out something, the guy's face changed. He kept talking to George, but without focus; he was somewhere else. He made no excuses, taking it for granted that a face-to-face conversation is just one aspect of what I'll call "contact multitasking."
There're two problems here, both worrying, and one has ethical implications. The first is practical: can we really carry on actual and virtual conversations at the same time and do it productively? Are we really understanding or absorbing what we're hearing and reading? Are we communicating better? Or are we just semi-communicating more? We usually skew or distort what we read or hear a little, because of our interests and biases, but we do that a lot more when we're handling too much.
The second problem is that if we claim someone's attention, and so their time, we owe them our attention. When we engage someone in conversation, whether to ask directions, to chat, or to discuss an issue, we make an attention commitment to that person and we implicitly ask that they make one to us. That means listening to each other.
When we juggle face-to-face and PDA or cell phone conversations, we lower the value of interpersonal contact by not fulfilling our attention commitment: in short, we talk, but we only half-listen. No one we're talking to gets our full attention, yet we claim their attention just by talking to them.
We all hate being put on hold on the phone; when we "contact multitask" we put everyone intermittently on hold. More than likely, this results in inefficient communication, but it's also violation of something basic. Our ability to talk to one another is what makes us social beings, and talking is intrinsically reciprocal. When we try to communicate with someone face-to-face as well as with someone not present, we break an implicit promise.
To follow-up, next week's article is on cell phones.
