Communication

Now this is what makes communication so strange: it doesn’t work in the sense that I can communicate my idea into your understanding. That is not how it happens. Instead, through the two disconnects, there is my struggle to articulate my ideas, to put them out into the airwaves for your collection. It requires both a sense of transparency that is hard to come by and a talent for converting a felt impression into communicable language.

From there, the thought is beyond the speaker, and it is in the hands of the listener. Now this is no simple reconversion of words into thoughts, but of images into ideas. Because, you see, when we take in words, be they written, spoken, signed, we don’t take them by themselves. If that were to be true, then they would be meaningless, as they would have no context, no significance, no relevance, and not even a hint of importance to them. No, when the waves propagate through the air and hit our eardrums, before they reach our consciousness, even, they must be made meaningful. They are translated from high-low pressure regions into thoughts, but not without the contamination of preconceptions, visual cues, or vocal inflections that may indicate anything other than exactly what is said. These things are all jumbled up together in the resulting idea that pops out as what we “heard”.

This is what makes communication so difficult, because in order to speak we must be transparent, and in order to listen we must see our own opaqueness.

This brings me to my example. Through an exchanging of words, I managed to make someone very angry with me. From her perspective, I couldn’t see where she was coming from, and the ensuing communications merely compounded the original infraction. The problem was the limiting capabilities of texting. While they are great for sharing information, they do a lousy job of sharing anything more complex than the time. I was struggling to express my perspective through a means that only shared words, nothing more, and words are easily misinterpreted. (“Why don’t you get out of here?” can mean more than one thing based on the tone in which it is said.) So I sat there, struggling to communicate that I understood what she was going through. And whether or not I was correct in my evaluation of her state, I had no way of telling her what I meant. Take it that I actually did understand, and imagine me telling her using nothing but black and white text that idea right there. It could not conceivably be interpreted correctly; she was already mad at me and had prior knowledge of me not understanding her circumstances. What are the messaged words “I know what you mean” going to do when I am up against the facts of my historical ineptitude and her emotions of feeling like I can’t possibly know, even if it was explained to me very clearly.

I like to think about what can and what cannot be communicated through the traditional means, and what I can do to remedy the miscommunications that frequent our lives. The only thing I have come up with is understanding things the first time around and then never messing up. Well, we’ll see how that works.