While I am not much of a fan of self-help books (as the people who know me might quip is pretty darned obvious), one such book caught my attention recently because it is all about communicating in the digital age. Is it just me, or are we humans increasingly behaving as though we are at the bidding of our handy little technology tools instead of the other way around?
In his new book Stop Talking, Start Communicating, published by McGraw-Hill Education this year, author Geoffrey Tumlin describes our digital dilemma this way:
“The very tools that enable us to maintain contact with people all over the world also serve, at times, to scatter our limited attention across too many areas. We fiddle with our smartphones during meetings and upset our coworkers. We bungle an interaction with an important colleague because we are distracted by an e-mail. We interrupt a fruitful collaboration to respond to a trivial text message…We type an e-mail to a client while talking to a coworker on the phone, loading the e-mail with typos while simultaneously mangling the phone conversation. ..today it is possible to spend hours at work sending and receiving countless messages, but still feel unproductive.”
Tumlin pinpoints three significant types of collateral damage this persistent distraction can cause in a section of the book aptly called “Blood in the Tweets”:
- Our “hypercommunicating” environment is increasingly inhospitable to productive and meaningful communication because it leads to “message overload and distracted conversations, which in turn cause error-prone interactions…Our concentration fragments, our ability to listen degrades, and our attention scatters.”
- Speed and convenience have become guiding communication principles. “Too many e-mails?” Tumlin illustrates. “Reply with one-sentence messages, stop capitalizing (or TURN ON CAPS LOCK), and throw out your grammar book. Phone ringing? Let it go to voice mail and reply with a text message….Have an idea? No need to think it over; just send out a tweet. And who needs words anyway? LOL.”
- “The individual is king of the digital universe [and] that squeezes out interpersonal communication, where we not I is sovereign… effortless mass communication gives us the dangerous ability to inflict wide damage in mere seconds with our hasty words.”
Tumlin (a West Point-trained infantry ranger with a Ph.D. in communications) is emphatically not anti-technology, though. The rest of his well-written and entertaining book outlines ways to be a competent communicator both in person and when using all of the amazing digital tools we have at our command.
Often funny chapter heads give a taste for his “counterintuitive” but entirely commonsensical approach to getting communications, digital and other, back on a more productive track. For example, in the chapter called “Don’t be yourself,” he wryly observes that “Instant responses far too often are ‘Neanderthal’ [impulse-governed] responses and self-expression isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…. Restraint—the ability to not say something, even when you really want to—is what distinguishes civilized communication from Neanderthal communication.”
If, like me, you’ve sometimes found yourself longing for a little more sanity and a little more humanity in your daily digital dealings, the techniques Tumlin describes offer hope and help.
If, on the other hand, you’re savoring every e-minute, well never mind.
