Communication is complex.
As part of writing, and being a social creature in general I'm often thinking about communication and how it actually works. There's a number of categories and ways to categorise communication. Do we split it up between verbal and nonverbal? Or do we sort it by the number and roles of the participants, one to one, one to many, many to many, many to one. Or can we sort it by the time delay between the sending and receiving of messages, from symmetric real time to asymmetric with a long delay. We can even split it up by ephemeral or non-ephemeral
I'll start with the one to one communications as they are the type that most people have, and can comfortably understand already. Within this classification, we can have several sub classifcations
- In person - verbal and non verbal
- Verbal only (phone or skype)
- Written only (texting, chatting)
We can also add the non realtime symmetric communications
- Verbal only (voice mail)
- Written only (email, letters)
- Video messages (contains verbal and nonverbal information)
Lastly, we have the non realtime, asymmetric communications
- Written only (Books, blog posts, documents)
- Verbal only (audio instructions, audio books)
- Video only (movies, tv shows, instructional videos)
Now I'm a bit skeptical of including movies and tv shows, as they wouldn't solely fall under a definition of a one to one conversation. They also can be one to many. It's hard to call them a conversation, but it can be classed as a one to one communication, except one party is delivering information, and the other party is receiving it. Anyway, there's far too many to cover in one post, but I'll focus on the first one, in person communication.
One to one conversations in person are probably the most important thing to get right, but the way we are taught in schools to communicate represents an idealised way we should communicate compared with the way we actually communicate. Typically, we spend a good deal of time learning about nouns, verbs, adjectives, sentence structure. The purpose of this is to develop mastery of the language. Now I can only write about Australian English, but I imagine most of what I'm about to discuss is relevant as well. We are taught to communicate using our words, since if everyone can agree on their definitions, then all ambiguity should be removed.
For the most part, this is correct, communication with words is what we should aim for, but where things get complicated is in all the non lexical communication. The tone, the pacing, the emphasis on certain syllables all delivers additional information. Additionally, the body language communicates information about the state people are in, opening up, making yourself appear larger communicates confidence, where as crossing arms, crouching, or making yourself smaller communicates insecurity and fear. The distance placed between people, the angle between them, the amount of eye contact all communicate information about how the two people perceive each other.
Now all this information is a lot to consciously consider, for the vast majority of people, it's mostly subconscious. If you had to actively manage your body language, your tone, your posture as well as choosing the correct words to say to effectively communicate your message, your brain would be fairly overloaded. This is where the ambiguity comes into one to one conversations in person. The words someone is saying might be what you want to hear, but the rest of what they communicate adds significant weight about whether or not you can trust those words. It is especially difficult when the words and the body language are communicating different messages, which one are you to believe? Is the person actively controlling their body language or is a result of their subconscious.
Over the years I've been doing a lot of reading about communication, body language, posture, non verbal cues and various other topics. One of the things I try to do now, is to simply make conscious observations during conversations about these things. What is my posture, what is theirs? Am I fidgeting or am I engaged with what they are saying? I view it as trying to peak into my subconscious to see what it is I like or dislike about someone. I also view as a challenge to peak into their subconscious/conscious to see how they feel about me and what I'm saying.
I'll definitely come back to this topic at some point, but that's all for now.
Tags: communication, improvement, self, writing