The medium is the message.
Gosh, someone should write that down.
It’s incredible, given the many wonderful and instant ways there are to connect in the 21st century that 90 per cent of the world’s problems can still be attributed to poor communication.
The other 10 per cent is caused by teenagers.
Snapchat. Instagram. Facebook. Twitter. Even old-fashioned texting and emailing. They all offer ways to get our feelings out, share experiences, promote dialogue and bind the global village closer together.
The vast majority of users employ these miracles of digital technology to exchange recipes and pictures of cats.
Somewhere in there is a clue to the problem.
Moreover, there are daily reminders that electronic communication is an imperfect way to make oneself understood. It is two-dimensional, not allowing for tone or nuance. Emoticons were invented just to provide context to whatever is produced on the keyboard.
Don’t be offended by this message because it is accompanied by a winking smiley face.
Email should make life easier, at least in the workplace, but that is often far from the case.
Everyone has had the experience of sending an ill-considered message while in the grip of extreme emotion. No matter how great the desire, it is impossible to plunge your hand into the weaves of the web and pull back an insult or a sharp word.
There should be a two-minute rule that holds all emails in digital purgatory, before delivery.
Emails are particularly problematic when they get sent to the wrong person.
I had a horrible experience with this several years ago, while managing an advertising sales team in Woodstock, Ontario.
We were preparing to fire a marketing representative for cause, which was a fairly unusual occurrence in the business in central Canada given that most people got let go just because they worked in the newspaper industry to begin with.
This particular sales rep was an underachiever, and worse was dishonest and disruptive in her behaviour.
I went back and forth several times with human resources, preparing the necessary documentation and filling out paperwork. Put the finishing touches on the plan for the termination meeting and hit send.
Unfortunately that email was mistakenly addressed to the woman being fired the next morning.
This defines How Not To Fire Someone as well as Really Bad Day at the Office.
There is a whole different language developing out of digital communication that is confusing.
Example: LOL.
The first person to send me an email with LOL at the end was a young ad designer who worked in our newspaper’s production department. He was a nice guy and we had a good working relationship, but the message was obviously disturbing. Fretted for three days about how to handle the situation and finally consulted with a colleague who could barely contain her mirth at the dilemma.
So LOL does not mean Lots of Love, but how was someone supposed to know that?
Sometimes when texting back and forth with the kids it takes full minutes to decipher a particular abbreviation.
NP. NVM. Wouldn’t it be better to just type out the words so that everyone is on the same metaphoric screen?
Texting shares many of the inherent problems of emailing only it’s worse, because people tend to do it at the same time they are buying groceries or driving a car or consuming alcohol and all that creates greater margins for error.
A friend in Toronto — a grown woman mind you with grown children of her own —made the mistake recently of trying to send a nude selfie to her husband from her phone.
She hit the wrong number in her contacts and ended up sending the picture to her son’s hockey coach.
Now that’s LOL no matter how you read it.
Andrea Demeer is the associate publisher and editor of the Similkameen Spotlight, a sister paper to the Western News.
