Article Contributed on: 6/3/2009 9:20:15 AM
Years ago, after working a number of years at the jobs most art majors tend to get coming out of college, answering phones, taking orders, filing, customer service, etc. my career took a mighty shift when, in an economic downturn in 1978, it looked like a big layoff was in the offing, and I went to some job interviews at a major university.
Turned out, the place they needed folks the most was a computer science research laboratory, and ironically, the skills they needed most were the ones from customer service. If you can handle someone on the phone yelling at you for something you didn't do, apparently that mades it easier for you to deal with research professors engrossed in their work.
So, I went from using an old goofball typewriter into a completely new world, where word processors were in their infancy, but you had to use them, because typewriters were old hat. That environment, full of constant challenges, both technological (anyone old enough to remember teco can testify to that) and social (geeks are not known for their social skills, scheduling prowess, or political astuteness), taught me an awful lot of things.
The one that comes to mind lately is the way people communicate differently, not based on their social standing, or their age group, but in ways that made me wonder if communication wasn't a genetically-transmitted set of preferences. When you are dealing with folks who spend zip time on things like their image, playing the political games that will enhance their career (there were those, but not surprisingly , they weren't the best researchers), or making sure they are liked by the folks around them, chances are you have pure scientist types on your hands. The goal is the work. They will stay up all hours of the night, come back to work during a snowstorm if an idea hits them in the shower, and completely immerse themselves in the work, to the point where spouses call to make sure they're still around. Not your average environment, but the truth is, once all of the extraneous stuff (extraneous to a researcher anyway) is stripped away, you get a closer look at people, undistracted by social, political, or career agendas.
The Internet was certainly a factor, even in 1978. The secretaries and administrative staff learned that there were some profs you had no chance of communicating with unless you sent email. You could talk to them in the hall, talk to them on the phone, send them a paper memo, and somehow, it just flew over their heads unless it came in an email; then you got a response.
But, there were others; granted this scenario was often related to the older folks, but if you sent them something on paper it was real. I wasn't sure if this came from a preference for paper, or from living in the academic environment and getting burned by not having an official paper to point to if things went wrong. But conversations one on one didn't matter, email wasn't official -- only paper got through.
The staff got to where there was kind of a list of who communicated how, in order not to waste time trying methods that weren't going to work. For the folks (closely resembling the folks you see now; the ipod is never out of their ear, or the cell phone is in constant use) whose first choice was audio, the quick phone call got the desired results.
And there was even one case of the tactile; We even had one prof who was so obsessed with his work, and kept such strange hours, the only way to get through to him was to tape notes to the doorknob of his office. Then he noticed, and actually read the memo.
Sure, researchers are not the general population by a long shot, but in the years since I left academia, I've watched to see if those trends are out there in the "real world", and they most certainly are, with one addition - the visual. There are those who don't take anything as real until they see the video (not an option in the 80s at least individual video was not as pervasive as it is now). The communications patterns are there, in everyone, and we should probably take some time to notice who likes what, if we really want to get through.
Generally though, most of us like to believe that whatever works for us works for everyone. If you are always on the ipod, someone who isn't audial seems strange. If you only use your cell phones for emergencies, you're a bit of a throwback. If you need to have a piece of paper to be sure your back is covered, you're a bit paranoid. And, if you don't want to use the computer, well, you might as well be in the museum with the bones of the Neanderthal. Our preferences are our comfort zone.
We've got lots of technologies (well, paper was a technology that was cutting edge in Thebes at one point), but the sad thing is we have little real communication. Some of it is the general communications preferences we all seem to have hardwired into our consciousness. More of it, I suspect, comes from those overlays that get put on top of the basic core; political preferences, social preferences, and urges to control others, further complicating the task of really communicating.
We need to be able to communicate what we mean, and we need to be able to listen to the concerns of others. We all have our preferences, but until we understand that humans can't be cookie-cuttered into one style of thinking, no matter how hard we try, there will always be differences, and until we can learn to respect those differences, no real communication can happen. Our society will continue to splinter along lines of technology, political rivalry, and social status.
True communication has to include understanding. Listening only to get a hook to hang your next argument on is not communicating, and it's certainly not understanding. As our culture struggles with the economic realities (I don't care what the stock market is doing, look at how few folks are buying tickets to sports events, and how many companies have dumped their boxes - that's the real measure), true communication is going to be more and more necessary.
I don't care if someone doesn't agree with me. I want to understand where they are coming from. I want to hear what it is in their experience that tells them to disagree with a certain idea; maybe that experience will keep me from falling into some kind of pothole my experience didn't tell me to look out for. We can learn from one another, if we choose to. We can learn one another's communication preferences, but we also need to learn from one another's experience.
As we get those experiences, we will be better able to craft whatever we create with the appropriate checks and balances to ensure there are no abuses. We can' t afford to just follow dogma. We can't afford to use the power of government to insist that we all operate the same way, even when our experiences tell us it won't work. We can't afford to assume that everyone wants the same thing and force that from the top. Our differences will splinter us as a culture.
It's time to look, not for communication technologies, but for communicated understanding, and to cast aside the spin, the pushing for an agenda, the dogmas that tend to come from partisanship, the holier than thou feeling of being right when everyone else is wrong, and LISTEN. It is what we hear and understand that will ultimately bring us success.