Jack Averty: The power of the spoken word or lack of it

I am not some born again preacher or the next rap superstar – as much as I would love to be either – but this week I did learn that sometimes it is good to just talk to people face to face.

It may shock you to hear that as a millennial snowflake from generation X (is that all the stereotypes covered?) I am actually not all that fond of all this communicating over email, text, instant messenger etc.

Sarcastic

Yes they are quick and easy ways to make contact with someone but they’re also impossible to get the tone right. How many times have you flown off the handle at something someone has sent you because you thought they were being a sarcastic idot, when it turned out that actually they were being perfectly civil and you just read the situation completely wrong?

It’s far too common.

This week I had a run-in with someone who sent me, what I deemed to be, an incredibly rude email. I in turn fired one back and the war of words was in danger of escalating if it wasn’t for them reaching out and offering to talk it out.

So talk it out was what we did. It turns out that the email wasn’t really that rude, I had just, surprise surprise, misread the tone.

Talking in person we both got on perfectly amicably, made our points elegantly and I left feeling far better than I did firing off the retaliatory email.

Had we not talked would anything have got solved? Would the emails have just got increasingly worse? Would we just exclaim to colleagues how much the other person was an idiot and we were never talking to them again?

It is far too easy to be passive aggressive over the internet. Saying ‘yep, fine’ to a request in person is perfectly pleasant and no one would read anything into it, but over text it sounds like you are the moodiest person alive.

There’s two reasons why the same words can be interpreted differently when they’re either written down or spoken aloud. One is that with spoken word you can hear the tone that the other person is taking.

If someone is laughing down the phone when making a close-to-the-line remark about something, you can safely assume they’re joking, but the same cannot be said over text. Is adding lol really enough for you to determine whether someone is playing around or trying to get your back up?

The other reason involves face-to-face contact. If picking up on someone’s tone isn’t enough to determine which way the conversation is going, then you can always look at their facial expressions and their body language. You don’t exactly need to be a psychologist to see if someone is going to lamp you or hug you.

But all of that is just common sense really isn’t it.

Perhaps the problem is a generational thing, with younger people now spending all their free time on their phones, texting their mates and tagging them in silly videos, instead of running around like hooligans in the local park kicking a football. If you wanted to speak to your pal twenty years ago then the only option was to go round to his house and see him, now he’s just a few taps of your finger away.

Perhaps I’m lucky in that this smartphone/digital revolution has only properly taken hold in the recent past, meaning in my childhood/teenage years I was still forced to communicate the ‘old-fashioned way’, as life veterans might call it.

But this also throws up a fair bit of concern. If I’m 26 and have just about scrapped through with a good level of communication, does this mean people younger than me have only ever grown up talking to their mates online?

Have they never learnt the art of communicating face-to-face?

Are we facing a situation where people will not be able to defuse any online conflicts in person because, well, they don’t know how?

You read reports now of children spending their breaks texting each other rather than running around like headless chickens.

No one is knocking technology and the revolutionary impact it has had on the world.

I for one love coming home and telling my pal Alexa to turn the light on rather than flicking a switch, which would be infinitely quicker. But for all the good technology is doing, there’s also an argument to be had that it is having a detrimental affect on communication.

But how can it be solved? Do parents need to limit their children’s screen time and force them outside? Do schools need to ban phones?

Both can play a part, but ultimately the older children get the more they need to shoulder the responsibility to put their phones down and communicate with friends, and later colleagues, properly.

No one wants to be known as that guy in the office who emails the person sat next to them instead of striking up a conversation.