E-War

Boy are there ever a lot of great things about instant communication. If you lose your husband in the mall, a text can save you from an annoyed conversation and an aimless wander about. If your child needs a ride home from the practice that just let out early...voila! You are instantly notified. School closed because of weather? No problem. I'm on the early notification e-mail list for two different school districts now. I will never forget another "friend's" birthday because of all those facebook notifications I get every morning (unless the birthday falls on a weekend when I'm facebook free that is).

We can instantly communicate to anyone on our terms. Why call and waste 5 minutes when you could text the specifics of what you need to say? You don't have to wait and stew (and maybe settle down and organize your thoughts) until a face to face meeting with someone you have a conflict with anymore. You can just e-mail while it's on your mind. You can FORWARD e-mail and share conversations with people that were not intended to see the writer's words, while the person who initially sent it to you rests under the illusion that the conversation was private.

Private?

What?

There is no privacy anymore, and no need to really sit face to face and resolve our issues with each other. Would you really sit there and say what you just wrote to that person's face? Are you willing to watch the damage of your words unfold in real time? Are you willing to face the consequences while being in actual physical proximity to the other?

E-mail, text and facebook seem to have given many of us a false sense of empowerment and bravado. Once we are behind the safety of a faceless electronic communication device normal etiquette rules sometimes fly out the window quicker than a driver with road rage flipping you the bird.

Many of us, at one time or another, are guilty of over emoting, sneak attacks, stealth bombing missions, psych ops, and destroyer missions that feel more like war tactics instead of human communication.

Several years ago I opened the floodgates with someone specific and let my words fly. It didn't help. The replies I got only served to highlight that we had completely missed the mark with each other. Neither of us felt heard, neither was satisfied with the outcome, and neither was willing or able to resolve our conflict at the pace that we were able to fire off our attack. There was no damage control, no inventory of losses, no back to the table tactics that ever emerged from an electronic communication.

Those only came face to face...after some hard work and desperate attempts to resolve what had become a very hateful experience for us both. Sometimes in relationship it takes a great deal of discomfort and desperation before we are willing to change what we have been doing.

E-mailing or texting our frustration is easy. We should know by now though, that the reader will only read what he/she already believes to be true. Our electronic communication limits what we can really communicate and what we are really able to hear.

What can you do if the other person refuses to really engage you in a human way? Nothing really. If you or the person you are communicating with is stuck behind their computer neither of you has much hope of resolving things in a peaceable way. It's still a nuclear arms race of sorts.

I'm reading a great book right now by Stephen Covey called, "The 8th Habit." Get this,

"There are basically four modes of communication: reading, writing, speaking and listening. And most people spend two-thirds to three-fourths of their waking hours doing those four things. Of these four communication modes, the one that represents 40- 50 percent of our communication time is listening-- the one mode we have had the least training in."

You know what strikes me? We are not able to listen to e-mail or texts or facebook statuses. We read them through the lens of our belief and the paradigm we have chosen to live our lives through. When we respond, we aren't actually responding to what the person meant...or tried to communicate...instead we are responding to what we READ. We read to support our presupposed beliefs.

What a disaster.

Last week I watched my son and a new friend sit hip to hip and text each other while we were driving home from a youth event. What happened to good old fashioned talking, giggling, and poking each other?

We have given humanity the ability to express...the abilities to really listen and interact face to face are something completely different. Until we can learn to do that well, e-communication, while convenient, has great potential to be used as a weapon inside the context of human relationship.