We’ve become quite good at succinct and stunted conversations; ones that end before they really begin.
We take being understood for granted. Most of the time, we speak efficiently with yes or no answers and oddly, they suffice. It’s easy to speak in 140 characters or less because it’s easily digested. You might say that what we once called small talk has taken the place of real conversations and these real conversations have moved, to a large extent, out of the public sphere and into our private lives – still, sparingly so. We assume that because we understand something a certain way, that others should too. In reality, the more complex your thoughts or message, the more you must explain and elaborate. These are the limits of communication.
You simply cannot convey a complicated message and expect others to understand. Most of us slash, cut, and eliminate words until we reach the core of it all, but this effectively reduces what we wanted to say to a mere ghost image – a reflection, of what we wanted. So perhaps you’re well-versed on twitter, take stunning photographs on instagram, and have mastered the hashtag down to its horizontal lines, but what message have you sent in the process? Is it the one that you intended? Without guidance, human minds fill in blanks according their own world-views. And when you fail to reach an common understanding through no fault of either party, the message has become irrelevant of its own accord.
We look at the world through tinted glasses of our own making. A lot of us have these glasses handed down to us from our parents and we scratch them, drop them, and color them with our own markers.
We can’t just forget about the backstory. Doing that eliminates emotion, feeling, depth, and perspective. The subjective is forcefully objectified. Adjectives that house feeling are stricken and all you’re really left with is a bland mesh of haphazardly thrown-together words. We look at the world through tinted glasses of our own making. A lot of us have these glasses handed down to us from our parents and we scratch them, drop them, and color them with our own markers. We make them our own, but the important part is that we’re still wearing glasses. Our subconscious will always provide a bias. To say that a person is truly and only objective would be saying that this person lacks depth of character, feeling, and individuality – ruled only by logic and nothing else. This is, at least in 2014, unattainable.
The point of communication – of words, art, literature, music, film, photography, dance, anything really, is to send a customized message that, hopefully, will be understood the way we want it to be. Messages carry a lot of weight and when something is misunderstood, it is usually taken out of context or injected with assumptions. Knowing this is the case is a good start, but beginning to formulate better messages and reacting to misunderstandings in a more open, non-defensive way is the key. When you’re constantly misunderstood, you have not realized that communication has it’s limits and that sometimes in order to get your point across, you actually have to do some listening, do some feeling, do some thinking, and then send a message back that is put together with effort.
140 characters doesn’t cut it and neither does passive-aggressive mumbo jumbo that involves, at its core, a dismissive air of “holier than thou” and no effort to affect a change in understanding.
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