Today, we have so many methods of communication available to us–all with the purpose of bringing people together. Our world has become a global village, and it is important for us to be able to communicate with those across the world. But what about those across the room?
In a small office, e-mails are sent back and forth between colleagues who share the same cubicle wall. It must take a lot of effort to peek over the partition to ask if a co-worker has completed their assigned task.
With the advent of social networks, an e-mail is sometimes even seen as too personal. And it’s almost unheard of that someone pick up the phone to see how a friend or family member is doing. Why take the effort to dial a number when you can send someone a message to say what you need to say without having to go through the discomfort of voice-on-voice action?
And don’t even get me started on blogs. From my understanding, the purpose of a blog is for people to come together and discuss topics that interest them. Whatever happened to getting together and talking over a cup of coffee?
In the future of communication, is personal contact left out of the equation?
Thoughts?
4 comments
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January 23, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Connie Pappas
It certainly seems that way. Personal contact via the web/blog/texts/facebook is definetly lacking. It is a dangerous thing due to the fact that one sentence can be read in different ways depending on the reader. Although this type of miscommunication can also occur in a face-to-face conversation, the risk is significantly less. I don’t know how many times I have had to ask when chatting online with friends, “are you being sarcastic?”
January 23, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Rick Weiss
I worked in an office with a group of people my own age, and we typically got up and spoke to each other (unless we had a quick thought while in the midst of our work). Email is good for details that you want a record of, but discussing the concepts of those details, I like face to face.
There’s some things that I just don’t like to do over IM/email. I don’t like telling stories that require an element of delivery. Blogs, email, facebook, IM are all good tools for carpet-bomb networking, face-to-face is required at some point to deepen the practice.
January 24, 2008 at 3:37 am
kraven132
You know what I think there should be more of? Snail mail. For all of the convenience of email, there’s just no feeling like getting personal mail. And even though it’s not face-to-face communication, you know that someone went to the time and the effort to write out the letter and buy the stamp, and that’s much more valuable to someone than knowing they just hit “send”.
It doesn’t have so much applicability in the business world, since time is of the essence, but maybe something to think about for our personal lives?
January 29, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Gary Schlee
An interesting phenomenon is the compelling desire by bloggers and podcasters to get together to talk over a cup of coffee, or a pint of beer. So, just when we thought virtual forums were detracting from our face-to-face encounters, we discover the proliferation of these human encounters in the social media media sector. Hence, the emergence of geek dinners, barcamps, podcamps, casecamps, unconferences, meetups, etc. I’ve actually socialized professionally more in the past year through social media connections than through traditional networks.
I agree. I don’t really need to converse online with folks I see in person, but I do appreciate the ability to have that ‘online conversation over coffee’ with practitioners or educators who are based in other provinces and countries.