Communication – Too Much, Too Little

I don’t know about you but I keep receiving emails that remind me that I have not been on Facebook for a century, that I have just been poked, or that I have not accessed Linked In for an eternity. It is extraordinary in the last few years how the many channels of communication we have.

It is only fifty years ago that apart from face to face contact we only had two main means of two-way communication, letter or telephone. Ok I know that you could send telegrams, but they were essentially a quick letter or you could use a short wave radio, but neither was ubiquitous. Even the telephone was a medium that was rationed as phone calls were comparatively expensive, and as for communicating with another country that was a luxury that had to be booked and restricted to three minutes.. Did that improve the quality of communication; no I think that the proportion of trivia in a three-minute phone call was probably greater. And for every Evelyn Waugh a master of writing letters most letter writing was probably drearily domestic.

Now we have many channels of communication, and it is completely ubiquitous. If you want to cut yourself off from knowledge of the world you have to consciously not answer your phone, look at your emails or Tweets. In fact it is blindingly obvious if you are being ignored by a recipient of your mobile phone call, text, email, Tweet, etc, there are no excuses like they were not in when the phone rang etc….

There was a famous episode of the Likely Lads in the 1970s (too much to explain, Google it) where the two main characters go to extraordinary lengths not to find out the results of a soccer match which will be shown later on TV. Imagine the even greater difficulty of undertaking that now. It would not only be newspaper billboards, or the pub that our heroes would have to avoid.

So at my advanced age I find using multiple means of communication challenging, witness that as I blog more I Tweet less. I find the medium of the blog much more considered a sort of letter to myself that others happen to read. You will not have the book form of a Sheppard’s rambles; they are available in daily doses for you to read. Texts are for short instance communication, while email is excellent for private business. Video calling is excellent to communicate with the grandchildren etc…So I suppose that I do use multiple channels but increasingly I am compartmentalising each one to a particular usage. They are actually bespoke means of communication.

So I welcome these many ways of communication, I probably need to get out of my comfort zone and use more. I will have to try Tweeting when I have a customer service problem!!!