Why We Misunderstand Each Other in the Digital Age
A message arrives saying, “Fine.”
There is nothing particularly complicated about the word. Yet depending on who sent it, what was said before it and how long they took to reply, “Fine” can mean that everything is fine, that nothing is fine, or that the conversation is definitely not finished.
This is one of the odd things about communication in the digital age. We have more ways to communicate than at any other point in history, and we can reach almost anyone within seconds. Yet the faster and easier communication has become, the more opportunities we seem to have to misunderstand one another.
A great deal of human communication has very little to do with the words themselves. In person, we notice tone of voice, facial expressions, pauses and small changes in behaviour. We can usually tell when someone is joking, irritated or hesitant. If we say something that lands badly, we see the reaction and can correct ourselves before a minor misunderstanding becomes a larger one.
Most of that disappears in a message. What remains is a collection of words on a screen, and the person reading them has to supply the tone.
That can produce some strange results. A short reply from someone who is busy can appear unfriendly. A delayed response can be interpreted as deliberate when the other person may simply be in a meeting. A full stop can suddenly seem unusually serious. Even an innocent “OK” can leave someone wondering whether they have done something wrong.
Emojis were supposed to help with some of this, and in their own way they have created another language to misunderstand. A thumbs-up can mean agreement, acknowledgement, enthusiasm or a polite way of ending the conversation. Different generations can read the same emoji quite differently. We have managed to make a small picture of a hand surprisingly complicated.
The problem becomes more noticeable when the subject itself is complicated. We often try to resolve disagreements through the same tools we use to ask what time dinner starts. Long messages are written, rewritten and examined sentence by sentence. The reply arrives, another phrase is interpreted badly, and before long both people are responding as much to their interpretation of the other person's tone as to what was actually said.
Speed adds another complication. A letter once required enough effort that there was time to consider what you wanted to say before sending it. A message can be written and delivered while you are still annoyed. The gap between feeling something and communicating it has become very small.
The same thing happens in business. Email and messaging have made working across offices, countries and time zones much easier, but difficult conversations have not become easier simply because they can now happen instantly. A message that looks efficient to the sender may sound abrupt to the recipient. Feedback intended to be direct can feel harsher without the tone and context that would accompany it in person. People can spend half a day exchanging messages about something that might never have become a disagreement if they had been sitting in the same room.
There is also the temptation to read too much into silence. We know that messages can be delivered immediately, so we begin to expect responses at a similar speed. When one does not arrive, the absence itself starts to communicate something. We wonder whether the person has seen the message, why they have not replied and what the delay means. Often, it means very little.
What interests me most is how much of digital communication is actually interpretation. We receive a few words and construct the rest ourselves. We decide that someone sounds annoyed, dismissive or impatient, often with very little evidence beyond punctuation, response time and whatever mood we happen to be in ourselves.
Once we have made that interpretation, it can be surprisingly difficult to let go of it. We respond to the irritation we think we detected, the other person detects irritation in our reply, and suddenly a tone that may never have existed has become quite real.
Technology has become remarkably good at transmitting our words. It still leaves us to work out what people meant by them.
That may be the part worth remembering the next time a two-word reply seems to require a twenty-minute analysis. The missing information is not always hidden between the lines. Sometimes, we put it there ourselves.