What We've Got Here is Failure to Communicate

It's no breaking news that the internet has revolutionized the way we socialize. There's e-mail, texting, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogging, match-making websites, and countless other ways that we can socialize with each other without ever leaving the computer screen. I'm a texting and e-mail junkie, and I have a Facebook page and this blog. I tinkered with Twitter for awhile but never really got the hang of it or understood the point of it.

In the beginning, I thoroughly enjoyed Facebook and this blog. Facebook got me reconnected with high school classmates, including my best friend from my childhood, who I hadn't communicated with in over 20 years. It was an easy way to keep up with my friends' and family's lives, as well as an easy way to keep them updated on what's going on in my life. This blog was a fun way to express things that were on my mind, and to feed my interest in writing.

But in the past couple of months, I've become increasingly disenchanted with both.

After receiving a considerable amount of backlash--both directly and indirectly--from my last post on this blog, I lost my interest in writing. I meant my last post as a means of venting and, to a lesser extent, a plea for help from other experienced parents on how to survive this difficult phase in my kids' lives. Apparently the child-rearing manuals that came with my kids got lost somewhere between the hospital and our house after they were born, because I don't know what the hell I'm doing most of the time. I just fake it, and sometimes I get it right. Sometimes things go very wrong for an extended period of time, though, and I get frustrated. I got some supportive comments from a few friends, but I was alarmed to discover that many other people took that post as an opportunity to question my parenting skills, my mental health, and whatever else was being questioned. I wanted help. I got scrutinized, instead. I didn't like it.

Facebook has become a similar headache. It seems that any of my posts that are anything but silly slapstick entertainment are hyper-analyzed. Comments are misconstrued, activities are judged, who I choose as friends are a source of contention, photos are criticized...and don't even get me started on those God-forsaken games like Farmville. God, I hate that game. What started out as a fun little time-killer turned into a full-time job with endless demands to send shit, build shit, harvest shit, fertilize shit, and on and on and on. The damn game didn't work right 80% of the time, it involved an endless string of pop-up windows, and then I started getting huge amounts of junk e-mail at home that I blame on either Zynga--the creator of Farmville--or Facebook prostituting my e-mail address out to the highest bidding john. I'm just so disgusted with the whole experience that I stopped playing all games a few weeks ago, and I'm taking a break from Facebook as a whole for awhile.

Obviously, I am responsible for what gets posted on my Facebook page and on my blog, so I'm not trying to play the role of martyr here. And I know I'm not the only one who experiences this. I read a lot of columns--entire columns!--on sports websites, analyzing and criticizing what athletes post on their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. What I'm sure the athlete meant as a means of expressing frustration with a situation turns into an entirely blown-out-of-proportion ordeal in the media. A 140-character post on Twitter leads to multiple 800-word columns of analysis, criticism, theories, and various interpretations on countless websites.

It got me thinking about what the on-line world has done to human socialization. Chuck steadfastly refuses to make a Facebook page, and only recently did he begrudgingly add the ability to send and receive text messages on his phone. His reasoning is that he prefers face-to-face interactions to anything on-line. And I'm starting to understand his perspective.

Human communication is a very complex process involving a whole slew of verbal and non-verbal cues. When we communicate solely through written text, especially with a limited number of characters, the vast majority of those cues are lost. The nuances of interpersonal relations go missing. Often, the communicator's intent is lost or misinterpreted. If I had expressed the same frustrations that I wrote about in my last post on this blog to a circle of live human beings, I guarantee that the response would have been different. People would have heard tone of voice, seen facial expressions, observed posture and hand movements, and all of the rest of the cues that we, as human beings, constantly transmit and receive. My style of communication--especially my sense of humor--relies heavily on sarcasm, exaggeration, context, timing, and the multitude of cues observable in face-to-face interactions. That doesn't always translate well to text. If I tell someone in person, "I want to choke my kids today!", they easily pick up on the other cues--especially if they know anything about me and know that I would never actually harm my kids--and recognize that I'm blowing off steam and maybe asking for assitance. If I post "I want to choke my kids today!" on Facebook, I have people contemplating calling the police and/or Child Protective Services.

Misinterpretations are often easily avoided with face-to-face communication. When I say something, I'm reading the cues of the person I'm talking to. I can clearly see when the person is not understanding what I'm saying by the look on their face, and I'm immediately able to address a potential problem, further explain my position, or otherwise clear up the misconception or confusion. That ability is lost when posting things on-line.

I believe, too, that when we interact face-to-face, we are much less inclined to dish out the biting criticism, the rude remarks, and the armchair quarterbacking that is so easy to distribute behind the safety of a computer screen. In face-to-face communication, we usually refrain from expressing those types of thoughts because we don't want to witness the hurt feelings, risk a punch to the face, or experience any other backlash from what we express. We have developed into a much more critical society, and I wonder how much of that is a result of the ability to post written comments and avoid the face-to-face repercussions of our comments.

Small conflicts get blown up into huge ordeals when we feel like we can just unload on someone by way of a keyboard. Such a storm is brewing right now in my workplace, providing a very real illustration of that point for me and the employees of two different offices. What could probably have been resolved with a quick face-to-face interaction or two is brewing into a full-blown knock-down-drag-out because of sharp-edged e-mails passing back and forth.

Sure, we've always had the rumor mill, the grapevine, the watercooler, and various other means of gossiping about people, but with the relatively newfound ability to comment on just about every single little thing on-line, and often from the safety of anonymity, we seem to have gotten more malicious, more inflammatory, more judgmental, more unforgiving, and more confrontational. We have fewer filters, less tact, and lowered inhibitions when we communicate electronically.

We have become, in my opinion, less human.

We have lost sight of the fact that human beings are...well...human beings. We make mistakes. We say stupid things. We have whims. We have desires. We have emotions. We have good days. We have bad days. We're not always rational. It is human nature to want to express those sentiments to other human beings. But because of the modern ways in which we communicate now, we often only see one dimension of a person's message, missing the totality of it. And way too often, our responses to those messages are malicious.

We actively seek out people's moments of weakness, taking great pleasure in rubbing their noses in their mistakes, reveling in their demise, broadcasting their defeats to the world, and standing over them, beating our chests in glory because, in this very moment in time, our lives appear to be better than theirs. We have lost the ability to show compassion, to understand, to empathize, to reach out a helping hand, to pick someone up when they're down, to identify with their anguish and offer a shoulder to cry on. We have lost the ability to celebrate someone else's successes without jealousy or wondering out loud who they screwed in order to get where they are now. We have lost the ability to turn the other cheek...to forgive and forget and move on. In our frenzy to rip the meat off the bones of others at every opportunity, we have forgotten that we are all human beings--that we're all in this together. We have forgotten to treat others the way we want to be treated.

It's what our society has become, and that's sad. But I can't change it. I can only adapt.

The lesson I've learned from all of this is that I need to step back a little bit from the on-line world and take a page from Chuck's book on reestablishing more face-to-face contact with people. And if/whenever I do return to Facebook and this blog, I need to censor what I write and what I post (and, taking my own medicine, lay off of Ryan Leaf). That's a shame to me, since I had the obviously idealistic belief that Facebook and a blog would be a good place to share thoughts, opinions, discussions, experiences, and laughs while keeping up with the same from people I'm interested in. All it's good for now, though, is sharing a few vacation photos and funny websites, and that doesn't hold my interest nearly as much.