Tuesday, February 14th, 2006, 6:13 am
Pitfalls of Telephone Communication
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VER the past few years I have come to loathe telephones. At first, it was just plain disdain for cellular communication. That kind of disdain dates back to the day when it was first introduced to in the public sector (as opposed to prestigious businesses). More recently, I decided to disconnect my phone or refuse to answer, having already avoided giving out my numbers. Snail mail likewise, but it’s an entirely different topic, which I will attempt to steer away from.
Why have I chosen to abstain from verbal communication that is job-related? For starters, electronic form saves space. I tend to scan every important paper anyway, but it is not searchable and it is time-consuming to acquire a copy. It is also difficult to file sensibly.
Moving on to a major pitfall of telephone-based comminication, negotiating tasks over the telephone is not efficient in terms of time. Moreover, nothing is logged in textual form, despite the rapid and rich communication, which is vocal. On top of that, vocal output from streams of consciousness is unorganised. It is the flawed way of talking, which results in serialisation of improperly-correlated ideas. In practice, this means that TODO lists that are agreed upon over the phone will be unpolished and badly written.
One more important issue is uncertainty and inaccuracies. I am inclined to prefer E-mail as it can be re-polished before the point of despatch. It can also looked at as a reference later. It can be duplicated, even forwarded to other people without any effort. Think about an E-mail containing “I spoke to Fred Bloggs yesterday and he said that…” versus just a forwarding of some mail within seconds.
Finally, to balance this discussion and give an opposite viewpoint, research suggests that textual communication can be damaging to relationships between peers. It conceals sensible tone and manner and adds tremendously to ambiguity.
According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.
February 14th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
All communication mediums have their issues. Like you, I personally loathe phone calls, however, when combined with a backchannel via a chat, IRC or a shared editing tool like SynchroEdit, I feel entirely different.
The original paper says the chance of picking correctly the intent of irony vs sincerity was no better then random chance. Choosing between irony vs sincerity is one of the toughest problems in plain text medium. One thing that makes it tough is that by convention we typically use “quotes” to show something is ironic. Yet this conflicts with using quotes for quotes, quotes for emphasis, and quotes for calling attention to a phrase — all common uses of quotes in text. No wonder we can’t interpret irony accurately.
There are also a number of other psychological and sociological causes for the cycle of flames, including over-interpretation of emotional content, emotional contagion, and lowered empathy during higher intensity emotions. I’ve written more about these in my blog at Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text.
February 15th, 2006 at 5:24 am
*nod* You are quite right. The role of ‘scare quotes’, as well as expression of emotions among text (in-line), is rather important. *smile* It is worth paying attention to context and even use emotion cues excessively.