It’s a growing, yet unspoken problem in many relationships these days:
We’ve become communicatively incompatible. There are too many ways to converse, each of us has a favored method (mine is email), and no one wants to compromise.
It’s a growing, yet unspoken problem in many relationships these days:
We’ve become communicatively incompatible. There are too many ways to converse, each of us has a favored method (mine is email), and no one wants to compromise.
He Texts, She Tweets—Are They E-Compatible?
Setting Digital Ground Rules to Become E-Compatible With Family and Friends
by Elizabeth Bernstein
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304708604577502672286303452.html
Dear Friends and Family: I love you and miss you and want to hear from you. But you’ve got to stop spamming me.
Please quit sending me long, unsolicited, multipart texts and Skype video requests during work hours. Facebook FB -1.95% messages I won’t see for weeks. And those phone calls where you hang up without leaving a message.
And please, I beg you, stop calling my cell, home and office phones, sending me texts and emailing all of my accounts—all within the space of two minutes.
In all the noise, I can’t hear you.
It’s a growing, yet unspoken problem in many relationships these days: We’ve become communicatively incompatible. There are too many ways to converse, each of us has a favored method (mine is email), and no one wants to compromise.
“This Pandora’s box has opened,” says Sherry Turkle, psychologist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of the social studies of science and technology and author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.” “The idea that I have to monitor my Twitter account, email, Facebook, cellphone and land line in order to keep in touch—and to keep straight how other people prefer to talk—is too much.”
How well we negotiate electronic communication in our personal relationships can make or break them, experts say. Dr. Turkle believes we need to start having “necessary and difficult” conversations about how to best communicate: We must learn to respect each other’s style, yet draw boundaries. If we fail, the risk is we’ll get so annoyed with each other that we won’t communicate at all.
Before getting married 14 years ago, Lisa and Deron Richens worked out compromises on religion, number of kids and politics. “Those were easy,” says Ms. Richens, a 45-year-old marketing consultant in Laguna Hills, Calif. “We talked about them out in the open.”
Recently, though, they discovered a potentially more-dangerous issue they had to resolve: Text (her) vs. phone (him).
Ms. Richens recently quit her full-time job to become a consultant. Instead of sitting alone at a desk from 9 to 5, she now works in clients’ offices, with no privacy and no time to chat. Suddenly, she started to find her husband’s phone calls just to say hello or ask her something were “trivial” and driving her nuts.
“I don’t have time to chitchat on the phone or talk about what we need at the supermarket,” Ms. Richens says. She told her husband: “Don’t call me at all unless something is burning or someone is bleeding.”
When he kept calling anyway, Ms. Richens ignored the phone. “Why didn’t you pick up or call me back?” Mr. Richens demanded. She began answering the phone and speaking two words before hanging up: “Text me.”
Mr. Richens, 43, a branch manager for an investment firm, says he prefers the phone. “You can get everything knocked out in one quick conversation, rather than she texts me, I text back and wait, she texts back and asks, ‘What did you mean?’ ”
But Ms. Richens began to think her husband wasn’t listening to her. “I felt that when he had a minute he expected me to have a minute,” she says. Husband and wife each held their ground for about three months. Then one day, Mr. Richens gave in and sent a text. “I saw the writing on the wall and realized I needed to get on board,” he says.
Ms. Richens says she feels relieved, because now she can be more responsive to her husband. And Mr. Richens admits texting can be useful for taking care of mundane stuff.
And sometimes he sends his wife a text that says, “When can you talk?”
Once upon a time, people weren’t expected to return a missed phone call because there was usually no way to know about it: There were no answering machines. You certainly never had to worry about someone trying to reach you in a business meeting unless it was a true emergency.
But now, thanks to our smartphones, it is never OK to be unavailable. Ever. Not for a minute.
This expectation of constant connectivity is making some of us crazy with insecurity. Did your email to a friend or relative fail to elicit an immediate response? Clearly, he or she is angry. Or totally sick of you. Or dead in a ditch.
And so we panic and behave badly. We send rapid-fire, increasingly anxious texts. We demand to know why we are being ignored. We spam the people we love most—leaving multiple messages across many different media within minutes.
This is why we need to have “necessary and difficult” conversations. “We have to learn how to say to each other: ‘Technology has created a situation where we are treating each other as though we were stalkers, but I don’t want to think of you that way,'” Dr. Turkle says.
I like to think of these conversations as tech training. First, explain how the other person’s annoying communication behavior makes you feel. (“I love you, and when I see seven messages from you pop up in a row, it makes me worry that something is wrong.”)
Then set some ground rules. Dr. Turkle says you should tell your loved ones how best to reach you—and promise that you will get back to them using that same medium. Realize, though, that if you want to reach them, you will need to use their preferred method, not yours.
If this approach fails, you can always just block the offending type of communication. This is what Richard Laermer, a Ridgefield, Conn., business-book writer, did. “People don’t think to themselves, ‘How does this other person want to be communicated with?’ They just do what’s easiest for them,” he says.
Mr. Laermer says his preference is email—because it allows for more depth than text, and it has a subject line. A while ago, he used the telephone to reach his close contacts and ask them to email if they wanted to reach him.
And so of course, they texted him. At first, he ignored the texts. His friends called to berate or, in some cases, make fun of him.
“They thought I was being a jerk about not texting,” Mr. Laermer says. But he didn’t back down and even changed the settings on his cellphone to disable texting.
He hasn’t gone back. Sometimes he will email friends or a loved one. Some email back, but others don’t. “I don’t think I’m missing anything, though,” he says. “If they insist on only texting, they’re not my kind of person anyway.”