Why Is it So Hard to Communicate?
We have more ways to do it than ever.
“I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.”
— Tom Lehrer
My high school was on a university campus, and they let us go wherever we wanted during free periods. We’d sometimes wander around campus. I recall sitting with my friend Lucy outside the Baskin-Robbins on the main stretch of Campustown, as the campus downtown was called, and wondering where our other friends were. “If only we had some kind of Walkie-Talkie,” we’d exclaim, “we could find Mary and Bill right now!”
Because our high school belonged to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where the internet was practically invented, we had access to computers and could do a bit of emailing and online chatting — though they didn’t go by those names. Email was known as Personal Notes, or P-notes, and chat was Talkomatic, followed by a later iteration called Term-Talk. Which I know only from looking these up, not from memory; I must have been more interested in the functions than in the names.
We could communicate via P-notes and Talkomatic only with other users of the PLATO system (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, though I doubt I knew that at the time), which was created by Don Bitzer, a computer scientist in Urbana, and also used on some other college campuses. When our friend Susan’s father was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii during our senior year of high school, PLATO gave us a way to communicate with her. Phone calls were expensive back then.
We were on the cutting edge in the late 1970s. But our computer use was relegated to visits to a room in a building near our school filled with terminals connected to a mainframe in a separate (very cold) room. To have a Talkomatic session with Susan, we had to send her a P-note to schedule a time when we could all be at the computer.
Mostly, we connected with our friends in person or talked on the phone, often for hours. When we weren’t home, we’d manage to find one another by checking the usual haunts: the student union, Bubby and Zadie’s deli, CERL (the Computer-Based Education Research Lab, where the PLATO computers were housed). We’d have late-night parties where we’d also spend hours talking, and late-night phone calls.
In contrast, a few years back, when a friend’s teenage daughter was involved in a long text thread with a friend to make plans for getting together, my friend had to convince her daughter to just call her friend. When the daughter finally agreed, she felt she had to text first to see if it was okay to call.
Why has it gotten so hard to communicate, when we have so many more ways to do it?
Before you come to the conclusion that this is going to be an old person’s “Get off my lawn” post, let me say that I love technology. We have a camera doorbell and porch lights on a timer, and I control our smart thermostat from my smartphone. I can check our solar energy production in an app. I do everything I can online rather than on paper. I love the cloud. I don’t know how I ever lived without my Paprika recipe and shopping list app, which syncs between my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. When we have to print documents to sign and scan them, I get annoyed.
But I also feel overwhelmed by all the communication tools we’re compelled to use these days. Apart from texting, I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Spoutible, Substack Notes, Mastodon, Slack, Google Chat, Zoom, Google Meet, Google Mail, Outlook, Teams, FaceTime, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, Telegram … there may be one or two I’ve left out. Saying I’m “on” them is an exaggeration; I don’t regularly use them all, by any means, and I’ve signed out of a few altogether. But I feel like I’m missing out on some connections because of that.
Every time my computer dings, I have to think for a minute to remember which app makes that specific sound, so I can look in the right place for the incoming message. Part of this is a function of being a consultant with clients who use different tools. But a lot of it is just how life is these days.
What’s confounding about it all is that people seem to communicate less than ever.
As loquacious as we humans are, high-quality communications always seem to elude us, whether it’s in relationships, in social settings, or at work. We’ve always had challenges communicating, so that’s nothing new. But modern tools seem to be hindering that rather than helping. I’ve noticed over the years that the more methods of communication become available to us, the less we seem to communicate.
Of course, texting, Twitter, and Instagram encourage brevity. But there’s more to it than that. We can use email for longer missives, but lately, people seem averse to communication methods that require more words. They’re also less likely to respond to communications in whatever form. In the past, it would have been considered rude not to reply to letters or return phone calls. Now, it’s routine to leave communications dangling.
Are people simply feeling bombarded? Once we post on Facebook and answer a few emails, does that deplete our communications muscle for the day, leaving us unable to do any more? Do all the notifications constantly interrupting us make us want to retreat into silence?
I suspect that people are overwhelmed by and burned out from all the ways we can now communicate. It’s all gotten to be too much.
To be clear, I’m not against communication tools. As an introvert and someone who values my time, I love that I can email or chat with a company instead of having to call them. I love that it’s so much easier now to stay in touch with friends and family around the world. I love that it doesn’t take twenty phone calls to schedule a meeting or a party. I love the technology that enables all of that.
But I wonder what we’ve lost with the proliferation of all these amazing tools.
I also wonder how it will all shake out. In a decade or two, will we have trimmed down and consolidated our communication tools? A monopoly on communicating wouldn’t be healthy, but some kind of simplification would be welcome. I have a feeling it will come in a form we aren’t even imagining now. Back when we were sitting in front of Baskin-Robbins, Lucy and I may have essentially wished for mobile phones. But we certainly wouldn’t have imagined we’d be carrying around much smaller, more powerful versions of PLATO terminals in our pockets.
How do you feel about all the ways we can communicate today? How do you think we’ll communicate in the future? Let me know in the comments!
I remember working at the teachers’ union in the late 90s. And we had rented cell phones to use basically as walkie talkies during an event at the Capitol. I was with the press secretary, and our phone rang. But no one had shown us how to answer the phone. So it just rang and rang and then stopped. Heh.
And then there are the haves and the have-nots. While you (and Mary, Lucy, Susan, etc.) were using computers to communicate, just a mile or so away at the public high school, I never touched a computer. So Susan was in Hawaii; you, Mary & Lucy were in Urbana; and I was in England. But I still had no computer access, so we were limited to those lovely blue folding air mail envelopes. I had similar issues a few years ago when some members of my Girl Scout troop were homeless - they often didn't have internet access or even a good phone plan.