Are You Sending a Message or Having a Conversation?

by Mitch Anthony

Recently Mitch’s 12-year-old niece had a phone conversation with her grandmother. After she hung up, she turned to her mother and said, “That was weird…I said something and she listened; then she said something and I listened, and we just went back and forth like that.”

Her mother responded with, “Dear, what you just did was to have a conversation.”

“It was really different,” was her reply.

To this young girl the back and forth of conversational exchange––the tuned-in listening and responding––was perceived as a foreign experience. This anecdote gives us reason to pause and question whether the world around us is evolving or devolving in communication. We must also question just how much we are being shaped and influenced by the communication forms we are using. Marshall McLuhan, the leading prophet of the electronic age, asserted that “the medium is the message.” Our question is, “How deeply has the medium molded the messenger?” Are we becoming anatomical extensions of the technologies we employ to keep in touch? Are we beginning to behave just like our communication technologies?

Our discussion is centered on whether these modes of communication are helping us evolve into more effective communicators or hastening our devolvement into nothing more than messengers who send and contacts who receive––thereby unwittingly missing the vital linkage that substantiates communication.

Culturally and individually, we would do well to examine whether we are becoming more impatient in our communication with others. Are we becoming more self-centered—more clipped, bottom-line oriented, demanding, and dismissive? What role do devices and technologies play in shaping our communication behaviors and attitudes?

Ask yourself if the modern mediums for communicating are helping you become a more patient communicator, a more understanding listener, or a more thoughtful responder. One clear impact of technology on us is how it is eroding our ability to converse––often neutralizing our desire to engage in dialogue.

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It is ironic to note that Thoreau lamented over this very topic of technological influence on communication behavior well over 100 years ago, with the advent of telegraph wires across the countryside. Because people had to pay for each word, he felt that they would necessarily reduce their communication to the bottom line. Words were literally measured with money—the communications technology era had begun.

Thoreau felt that the art of conversation and human connectivity were in peril and that people would soon fall into a pattern of directing messages at one another instead of exchanging the deeper chords of conversation. Sound familiar?

If you look at your latest phone bill, you may see a trend toward fewer minutes on phone conversations and a proliferation of text messages—paying by the word, if you will. For most of us, this is a good enough reason to opt for the unlimited texting option.

Today, however, we seem to have a slightly different economics issue––one that is more about the economy of time than money. We have become impatient communicators, with a stopwatch instead of a clock. We feel a perpetual and driving need to jump to a conclusion without navigating causes and effects. The technologies available to us are feeding our general inclination toward impatience and creating distance between real conversations.

Arguably, the invention that blazed the trail for the current trend in communication took place in 1935 when Willy Müller invented the first automatic answering machine. This answering machine was a three-foot-tall machine popular with Orthodox Jews who were forbidden to answer the phone on the Sabbath.

In 1971, PhoneMate introduced one of the first commercially viable answering machines, the Model 400. The unit weighed 10 pounds, could screen calls, and held up to 20 messages on a reel-to-reel tape. There was also an earphone that enabled private message retrieval.

The original intention of the invention was to ensure that people would not miss any calls. The unintended consequence was that people had their first opportunity to screen calls and avoid conversation. They could now respond on their own timetable. People were literally “off the hook” regarding the obligation to converse with a person or on a matter where they would rather not. If a caller knew the other party also had an answering machine––and had a good idea when they would be at work––the caller could choose to simply “leave a message.”

The temptation to avoid face-to-face conversing when you could simply send a message had become real and actionable. Messaging had made its first major inroad into the space of conversation. Texting has now accelerated the messaging phenomenon into a dominant state of social intercourse. It is like a modern interstate highway system of communication where most of the traffic is flowing.

The trend in our society is toward messaging and away from conversing. But is messaging just another way to exchange information? Does it truly expand connectivity? Does it create empathy that binds us together? Does it propel progress? The answer is yes, and no. Messaging is wonderful for keeping in contact from a distance, giving updates, and for exchanging short and “quippish” ideas, thoughts, and whims. But we can only connect, empathize, and progress so far in the messaging mode until it begins to show its shortcomings.

Our modern communication technologies are designed for sending messages back and forth. This sometimes has the feel of conversation but is not truly conversing. Something important, something very human is missing in the exchange. We compromise connectivity when we choose messaging instead of face-to-face conversation. We are beginning to feel the effects of the downward spiral of connectivity and the natural temptation toward time preservation that these technologies create for us.

Have you avoided calls and face-to-face interactions, so that you could be in control of who you talked to and when? You may have felt insecure at times meeting with someone who needs to converse in person. Have you ever e-mailed someone in an adjacent workstation who is no more than 10 feet away rather than get up and have a verbal exchange? We are, in some ways, cocooning ourselves within messaging bubbles where we are in contact with people instantaneously but not necessarily in touch with them.

This trend echoes Thoreau’s lament over how wired communication would lure us away from human conversation. We can’t help but wonder what kind of conversationalists will emerge from the texting generation. If the medium is indeed the message, then the message is clearly, “Be brief, get to the point, respond immediately…and I’ll respond when it’s convenient for me.”

So informed are we by our technologies today that much of what we call conversation is actually a myth––little more than another form of messaging. We are seduced into the deception that messaging is the same as conversing. We meet with people and tell them our thoughts, and then they tell us their thoughts. Far too often, the art of conversation is lost in the exchange. Like texting and e-mailing, PowerPoint presentations often end up being nothing more than another form of verbal spillage––an erupting well that can be hard to cap.

Don’t get us wrong––we are not anti technology. In fact, we love the efficiencies technology offers. We both use messaging technologies each day and love having the expeditious and reductive option available when needed. But as much as the technology informs us as individuals, we also recognize how easy it is to lose touch with the borders between messaging and conversing.

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Hopefully by now you agree that there is a distinct difference between sending a message and having a conversation. It’s important that you stay in touch with those differences and use the available technologies to your advantage. One apparent skill is needed in your exchanges––being able to discern when and where messaging or conversing is the appropriate form of exchange.

Scott and I like to take our audiences through an exercise that illustrates this point in a memorable way. Participants are paired up and given a “communication kit” in which they find a mask and a blindfold. They are told that they are going to have a conversation about an important life issue. They will have the conversation in three segments of 90 seconds each. In the first segment, they are required to put on the mask and communicate via pen and a pad that they pass back and forth. In the second segment, they are instructed to take off the mask and put on the blindfold and resume their conversation verbally. In the final segment, they are unfettered from both props and encouraged to converse.

When witnessing the final segment of this exercise, it often seems as if shackles have been removed from the participants. The air is cleared of obvious frustration and communication impediments. They talk freely and in an animated fashion. At that moment we ask, “What does this remind you of?” Immediate responses include texting and phone calls and the shortcomings of each. We also hear the realization that people tell more than they talk. We hear a lot of “aha’s.”

We should all be concerned about the growing tendency toward succinct, bottom-line “ground strokes” being punched back and forth without having time or opportunity to hear nuances of tone and cadence or the ability to view body language. When connectivity is at stake, there is no form of communication that is a suitable substitute for face-to-face conversation where one person listens and attempts to process what the other is saying.

When dialogue moves from a phone call to texting, we remove one additional sensory perception by removing our ears from the conversation. We can no longer hear the hesitance, the relief, or any of the other audible clues to emotion. We are trusting keyboard characters and symbols to interpret what the eyes and ears are designed to do––interpret emotion. This compromise is not without pitfalls, the chief of which is our brains being “wired” away from developing the instincts to converse about matters that require genuine conversation.

While the proliferation of messaging may really be about people wanting to get to the point, at times it is taken to extremes with many people outright refusing or circumspectly dancing away from conversation. In conversation, we can hear the inflection, feel the cadence, and sense the mood. With messaging it is far too easy to misread—we have “send” buttons but no buttons for “understand” or “interpret.” A lack of practice in conversation makes for imperfection in communication. Ask yourself, “Have the messaging technologies influenced me toward being a more impatient communicator?” Our guess is that your answer will be yes.

Our brain synapses are being rewired into states of both avoidance and impatience. We are literally being wired away from achieving connectivity by the forms we are using to connect. It’s time we take advantage of the most amazing medium of all—conversation.

Excerpted from Defining Conversations:  A Little Book About a Big Idea by Scott West and Mitch Anthony.  ©2011 Advisor Insights, Inc. For more information, click here.

Mitch Anthony is the founder and president of the Financial Life Planning Institute, the leading provider of financial life planning tools and programs. 

For more than a decade, Mitch and his team have provided training and development for both individual advisors and major organizations throughout the world. Mitch personally consults with many of the largest and most-recognizable names in the financial services industry on both financial life planning and relationship development.

Mitch has been named one of the financial services industry’s top “Movers & Shakers” for his pioneering work, and is interviewed by the media on a regular basis. The Institute is partnering with both Texas Tech University and the University of Georgia to develop financial life planning programs for their undergraduate programs. Mitch is a popular keynote speaker, columnist for Financial Advisor magazine, and host of the daily radio feature, The Daily Dose, heard on over 100 radio stations nationwide.

Mitch is also the author of many groundbreaking books for advisors and consumers, including perennial bestseller StorySelling for Financial Advisors, cited by “Financial Advisor” magazine as the number one “must-read” book for financial professionals. Mitch’s other books include From the Boiler Room to the Living Room, The New Retirementality, Your Clients for Life, Your Client’s Story, The Cash in the Hat, and The Bean is not Green. For information on these books and more resources, click here.

© 2011 Mitch Anthony