Sometimes in today's world, communicating can feel overwhelming or even ineffective at times. It was only twenty years ago when we communicated through snail mail and telephone. Twenty years ago you probably would not have had a voice mailbox. Even ten years ago some of my friends families did not have a voice mailbox. Within the past fifteen years, technologies such as email, instant messenger, and mobile text messages have been developed. These technologies were adopted into the mainstream very quickly and have become ingrained in our lifestyle. They allow for very fast communication. What took ten minutes, ten hours, or a few days to communicate now takes mere seconds. As a result, businesses operate more quickly and efficiently and overall our lives are more fluid. What I mean is there is less waiting for people and information. Being that most people check their phone and email constantly throughout the day, it is very easy to make dinner plans or communicate emergencies without hassle. However, being that there is no filter on our channels of communication, we are subjected to much useless information.
As mentioned earlier, it is clear to see how technology has positively influenced communication and, therefore, society. Businesses operate more effectively and simple means to contact loved ones make certain aspects of personal relationships easy. For example, because of Facebook I have been able to keep in contact with my closest friends from high school and even four years later our friendships are just as strong, if not stronger. If we did not have a centralized platform for group communication, I am unsure of whether our friendships would have been maintained. Regardless of that, it is undoubtedly true that maintaining a meaningful relationship would require much effort from all parties. From this perspective, technology is central to my closest friendships and invaluable to me.
That being said, it is also common for channels of communication to become polluted with miscommunicated messages or purely useless information. First, lets take a look at email. Email allows us to send electronic letters to people that are able to be received in a moments time. While this is great when communicating to friends and colleagues, it also means we are all subjected to spam and advertisements that we are not interested in. At virtually no cost, email bots can send thousands upon thousands of messages to personal email addresses. At the same time, regular people can do the same. Combine these messages and your inbox is a cluster of information you do not need or want which can be frustrating as you are expected to check email constantly. Mobile text messages are less subject to advertisements, but communication here can be a challenge. Choice of wording suddenly becomes vital because there are no non-verbal cues to give context to messages. We all know sarcasm is potentially the worst culprit for miscommunication when sending text messages. It is very easy for the receiver to misinterpret messages which again leads to frustration when communicating.
How do we address these issues?
Some would say that simply reducing technology usage solves the issue. This is true, however it's at the sacrifice of communicating quickly which, today, is important to most. Certain platforms such as gmail has helped reduce message pollution by implementing default labels for message categories: Inbox, Promotions, and Social Media. This separates meaningful information from the rest. This is a step in the right direction and many platforms are working toward effective solutions. Although it seems that the filtering of messages is to be left to the user, at least for the time being.
No comments:
Post a Comment