It seems that so much is going on in the world of communication that it makes my head spin just to think of where to focus, which is perhaps one of the great challenges of communication today. Communication seems to be so much about the technology of communication that we often forget what the basics are and how to measure them. To communicate today seems to be centered around getting information from one point to another, and making sure that it happens effectively, but the deeper issue is to understand what happens when we communicate and what the meaning is. Another question to think about is whether communication is an intentional activity, or whether it is just part of who are regardless of the medium or intention.
Paul Watzlawick was a great researcher on the topic of communication, somewhat forgotten in the digital age but incredibly relevant. Born in Austria in 1939 he studied with Jung, continued his studies in El Salvador before ending up in Palo Alto in 1960 where he worked with Don Jackson and followed the now famous Gregory Bateson. He worked mostly in the field of family therapy, but was interested in a much larger understanding of context in communication, seeing the dynamic as a system involving both parties and framing communication as something we do no matter what. To Watzlawick there was no non-communication, just as there couldn’t be a non-behavior, which meant that everything had to be studied as communication.
Another one of his ideas is that communication involves not only the message delivered, verbal or non-verbal, but the message received as a response, which might seem obvious but isn’t when you think of it. Much of our misunderstandings are in the ways we decipher the response to our ways of communication, which is understandably difficult since it comes from another person who might interpret things quite differently. In the age of rapid electronic messaging, the gap between what is communicated and what is received can be drastic, especially when we cannot measure what is received.
Watzlawick coined another distinction between what he called digital and analog communication, which is not the digital and analog we know. By digital he meant words, whereas analog depicts the non-verbal. Communication had to involve both, i.e. words and the way in which they were being delivered through behavior. The behavior involved the relationship and the context in which words have meaning, meaning also that words alone are not fully communicative without the understanding of their context and without understanding the relationship and behavior of both parties communicating.
This all made me think that we have substantially reduced communication in the age of electronic media in the sense that we have abstracted it to messages delivered without there being a true dialogue involving fully present and communicating individuals, integrating both the digital and the analog. Of course there is no going to back to old school, but perhaps we should think of what or who lies behind the screens that mediate.










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