You talkin' to me? Online; Phone Line; Face Time

[This is the third in a series of posts labeled "You talkin' to me?" dealing with interpersonal communication. All the posts in this series, except for the first, will be found at the current URL for this blog, all identically labeled. Only the first post in this series is archived at the original URL for this blog, but also identically labeled.]

In Sex, Time, and Power Leonard Shlain posits that Mitochondrial African Eve, the woman who is defined as the matrilineal most recent common ancestor for all living humans, emerged from the bottleneck of the "unyielding walls of the birth canal" that threatened the hominid precursor of Homo sapiens by "the dying off of increasingly large numbers of hominid mothers and their newborns." This Eve who was the source of our species

... became the first female of any species who possessed the willpower to refuse consistently to engage in sex around the time she was ovulating. ... Philosophers call it Free Will [timshel].

Shlain, moreover, posits "that the female of the human species, but not the male, 'passed through a bottleneck.' She emerged profoundly transformed, displaying some novelties that did not exist in any prior female of any other species." And here is the point that pertains to the subject of my post [my own emphasis added]:

This asymmetry in the reprogramming rate between the human sexes drastically altered the way the two related to each other, setting the stage for considerable future conflict and misunderstanding. The relations between men and women would generate great outpourings of emotional anguish that have reverberated down through the seventy-five hundred generations since ... African Eve.

The second part of my prologue draws upon Ray Kurzweil's concept The Singularity Is Near:

The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. ... ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.

Both Shlain and Kurzweil investigate and speculate about the ongoing evolution of humanity. And it seems obvious that interpersonal communication was, is, and will continue to be problematic as a result of the moving target nature of human and technological evolution.

The great evolutionary leap for humanity was speech. Initially it was, perhaps, only a minor advantage over the well established primate ability to communicate by various physical signals, including facial expression and other visual cues. Eventually, of course, speech far outstripped the capacity of pre-human capability to communicate. And speech enabled writing, which, in turn, enabled technological advances that eventually brought forth telephony and computers. Therein lie the problems of interpersonal communication.

As Shlain suggests, the asymmetric development of modern men and women is the root cause of much misunderstanding. The asymmetric development of humanity and technology is a source of misunderstandings too. As male development lagged and largely reacted to female evolution, so humanity must adapt to the far greater (and, according to Kurzweil, exponentially accelerating) rate of technological advances. Having only just (if considered in terms of evolution-scale time units) learned how to properly utilize the great advantage offered by speech over mere visual and aural cues, humans are now confronted with a myriad of technological innovations that further enhance the power of speech, but at the cost of a steep (also if considered in terms of evolution-scale time units) learning curve concomitant with misunderstandings that emerge from the resulting underutilization of old fashioned face time.

Telephony extends the power of speech to unlimited distances between conversants. But the price is absence of visual cues (for some reason visual phones have not yet emerged from their niche applications). So the (by now) instinctual information provided by visual cues (sometimes referred to as body English) is unavailable, and no doubt contributes to misunderstandings. A less obvious secondary effect of this absence is the added psychological pressure on the conversants to avoid extended pauses in the conversation, which no doubt distorts whatever unspoken impressions the conversants conjure up to accompany what is actually communicated verbally.

Finally, for this post installment, online communication, principally email, greatly extends the ease of relatively unintrusive communication that may [timshel] be as well thought out as time and willingness of effort permit. The price? Aside from the very clever, albeit largely unused and not quite effective, emoticons, not much in the way of body English cues. Hence, email is fully exposed to misconstrued nuance and virtually incapable of conveying elements of facetiousness, irony, and just plain kidding around. All of which, however, could easily be conveyed with merely a wink in good old-fashioned face time.