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Industrialized communication

When you can do it, personal communication trumps industrialized communication.

I don’t generally use social media because there’s just not much that’s interesting enough to make scrolling through worth the bother. But I do realize  most people like it.

What happens when you take a break from it? Here’s what a heavy user found after taking a break from social media for a week. “Not a single person noticed that I had stopped using social media. (Not enough to tell me anyway.) Perhaps if it had been two weeks? For me, this reinforced that social media is actually not a good way to “stay connected with friends”. Social media aggregates interactions between loved ones so that you get industrialized communication rather than personal connection. No one really notices if a particular person goes missing because they’re just one interchangeable node in a network.”

One-on-one communication is degraded a bit using electronics because some context and so many subtle physical cues become unavailable. Most effective communications happen best in person, then by phone, and finally via email.

When an author was asked how he was able to gather so much material for his book, he said his secret was, “The lesson I’ve learned again and again is this: when you see folks in person, they’re motivated to look for and pull out old things, and that doesn’t happen when you simply call them on the phone.”

When you can do it, personal communication trumps industrialized communication. Here’s a good talk on conversation with NPR host Celeste Headlee.