Explicit is better than implicit
Communicating the rules of communication
When you meet a friend for dinner in a restaurant, what do you do with your phone?
If you ask 10 random people you will probably get a bunch of different and often quite specific answers: Some shut it off or put it on vibrate. Others you use it to check Twitter or your email, but limit themselves to checking only when the other person is in the restroom. Some leave the phone in their pocket, some put it on the table.
With all these different ways of dealing with the same social situation it’s no surprise that this rather trivial example can lead to quite heated arguments or bad impressions being given.
“Yeah, he was checking his phone all evening, he wasn’t really there”
The science fiction author William Gibson coined the now well know quip
“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”
And it’s a very similar issue that is creating new social problems and perceived impoliteness.
Technologies are all around us these days, for some of us the Internet is bleeding more and more into the physical space. But for others, it’s still basically a TV with better shopping opportunities and videos of cats.
None of these perceptions is wrong or worse than any other, the Internet and the swarm of technologies it has brought to the party integrate differently in everyone’s life (and sadly not for everyone on the planet yet).
We are still used to our society, our peer group having an agreed upon code of rules we obey in order to be perceived being polite (or the corresponding term for some subculture that doesn’t care for politeness because it’s so boring/conservative/etc.). There are accepted rules on how to dress, how to eat and how to not fart at the table.
All those rules have survived the trip to the 21st century because we still dress and we still eat (even though whatever is acceptable clothing-wise is in a constant albeit very slow shift). But we haven’t developed a similarly accepted code of rules for using our technological personal extensions. And how could we have?
With almost everybody having their own perception of technology, their own way of integrating it into their life, into their existence, it’s an almost herculean task to create a set of rules that everybody can live by happily.
When meeting with my “tweeps” (people I mostly know from Twitter) for example, pulling out my phone and checking what’s going on in the virtual space is absolutely acceptable, when meeting my father it would deeply insult him. On the other hand I dislike it if people take a phonecall (that goes on longer than 20 seconds) while sitting at the table with me, if just because the noise is very distracting and blocks me from doing anything useful with my time.
Many of us are in multiple conversations at any given point in time: We have an exchange via email, had asked a question on Twitter where the answers start popping in and all that while we sit next to someone in a restaurant. Each one of these conversations has special rules, things that are acceptable and things that aren’t.
Learning to say what we like
There is one skill we (as a society) lack. Maybe it’s not as much the skill as it is the routine of applying it. I’s the skill to tell others what we like or dislike when communicating.
When meeting new people it’s hard to guess what their personal preferences will be just as we cannot reasonably expect that they know how we like our social situations to work.
Even when meeting people who do not insist on a physical meeting being “comunicationally exclusive” it makes sense to either ask when doing something that can be seen as a step towards interaction with the world outside of the meeting: “Is it OK if I put my phone on the table?” or “Would you mind if I check my messages, I had asked something on Twitter and am waiting for answers?”
But also people who explicity do not like something need to learn to communicate that preference in a non-aggressive manner: “Would you mind not checking your messages while dinner, I feel left alone at the table in that situation?” or for me “Whould you mind not taking calls while we sit here, I just hate telephone conversations even if I’m not in them?”
We won’t be able to all get our wishes fulfilled but with a little communication we might understand better why a person acts the way they do and usually that is when we are no longer bothered by their actions. And on the other hand it will make it easier for us to respect the personal needs and wishes of the person spending their time with us.
There is no binding codex anymore but with more explicit communication about our needs we will not only leave fewer meetings annoyed by someone’s behavior but also understand the people around us and the world that we all live in better.
And for those of us who suck at starting conversations (like me for example) this can spark quite a lively and lovely discussion and exchange about how we live and how we behave.
