Modern Communication: Myth or Minefield?

For hundreds of millennia, homo sapiens stumbled along with no means of communicating other than face to face. As a result, it is estimated that only seven percent of communication involves words. Facial expression, posture, gesture and tone of voice all contribute to understanding.  About four thousand years ago, we invented writing, stripping over ninety percent of the meaning from communication. This invention did not impact the bulk of humanity until early in the twentieth century, when improved literacy made snail mail a reasonable alternative to the spoken word.

Communication has gone much further downhill since then. In today’s world, we are inundated with options, and these have created new barriers to communication, because different people make different choices. Nowadays, to ensure my communications are even received by friends, I have to know their preferences with regard to texting, voicemail, email, video calling, old fashioned phone calling, and favored social networking sites.

One problem, which I’ve named Access Synchronization Syndrome, centers around the responsibility of contactees to add meaning to a communication based on its form. This can be a heavy burden if you have a large number of friends and frequently leads to misunderstanding. Here, from personal experience, is an example:

The other day, I was hip deep in a complex internet investigation on the maximum penalty difference between petty and grand theft felony in Washington and Oregon states -  just research for the book, honestly - when my phone rang. I usually let calls go to voicemail when I’m writing, but in this case, caller ID showed the cell number of a friend whose communication preference is emailing via her Blackberry.  She never calls outright. I decided whatever she wanted to tell me had to be critical, along the lines of having just broken both arms after falling downstairs, and my number was the first one she could scroll to on her Blackberry with her nose. I answered the call and here’s how our conversation went:

Me: Hey! What’s up.

Friend: Check your email.

Me:  I’ve got a dozen browser windows open here. Can you hang on a minute?

Friend: (silence)

Me: Hello?

Friend: (silence) 

Me: (looking at phone screen) She hung up.  

Because she’d opened the conversation with “check your email” as opposed to “I fell downstairs and broke both arms”, I wasn’t overly concerned.  When I abruptly terminate a telephone conversation, it’s always because my thumb has accidentally hit the poorly placed camera button on my cell phone and I’ve inadvertently taken a picture of my left hand.  I assumed something like this had happened to her and waited for a call back.

After waiting five minutes or so, my assumptions became darker. For example: her phone might be out of service because she’d been hit  by a bus and exsanguinations from her mangled body were now decorating an intersection downtown. This and other gory possibilities kept me occupied for another five minutes, until it occurred to me - maybe she knew I only check emails once a day and wanted to share time sensitive information via her preferred method,  which proved to be the case.

The Rube Goldberg quality of this anecdote illustrates another aspect of Access Synchronization Syndrome. Only in the modern world is it necessary to employ one form of communication to inform someone you've used another.

The second problem I’d like to bring to your attention is one I’ve named Frustrating Unwanted Crossover Knowledge. It is created when one’s friends participate in different social networking circles and/or have multiple online personas. Here again is a real life example:

I have a Facebook friend, we’ll call him A, who is, as far as I know, still married to B. I’ve never met B and she is not my Facebook friend, but she is a friend of a friend, so I know what she looks like. Recently, I took out a membership at PlentyOfFish - just research for the second novel, honestly – a social networking site that is much more up front with personal information.  My research required me to be a lesbian, and I set up my profile accordingly.  About once a week PlentyOfFish sends me an email about new matches, and it turns out B was smart enough to use a pseudonym, but not smart enough to change her face. She used the same picture on her PlentyOfFish profile as she used on her Facebook profile.

This is definitely a case of too much information. I am now forever barred from traveling to where A and B  and live. I can’t risk running into them at a restaurant. Not that B would recognize me, I used a pseudonym too, and put up a profile picture of someone I know is dead, just that, if we ever talked face to face and the 93% non-verbal communication kicked in, I couldn’t keep her secret.  

This is why I believe communication was better when all we had to know about someone was their home address and telephone number.  Maybe we had fewer options back then, but on the plus side, we never had to cross whole cities off our vacation lists.

Addendum:

I just got an e-mail from PlentyOfFish telling me they changed my password, because a hacker told them (s)he had access to their data, and advising me to change my password on any other site where I used the same one.  I doubt this is of much comfort to those whose personal and financial information is now in the hands of criminals, and am very glad I used a fake email account to set up my research.

A couple of days ago, I got an e-mail from a friend advising me her partner’s e-mail had been hacked and if I received a request for money from him, to please ignore it.

I’m not saying the two are connected. I’m pretty sure they’re not, given what I know of my friend and her partner. But following this co-incidence, I am now convinced modern communication is not a myth. It’s a minefield.  

Eyeball Wars

We are in terrible danger. I am writing this post as a public service. I only hope it’s not too late.

The earth is about to be invaded by aliens. How did I find this out? It all started last week, when Angela, the publicist, kicked off the first phase of the PR blitz for my book with the mailing of galleys to long-lead reviewers.  In typical me fashion, I was, in order of occurrence:

1)      Overjoyed. Important people, like magazine editors and newspaper reviewers, were about to read my book.

2)      Concerned. What if no one likes it?

3)      Resigned. Better to know now and get it over with rather than live in false hope.

Now it could have ended there, and you’d be finished reading this post. But there’s more to publicizing than just galleys, so I turned my attention away from grim prognostication of certain doom and moved on to phase two of Angela’s master plan: print features and radio interviews . Again in order of occurrence, I was:

1)      Thrilled. Semi-famous people would ask me questions, making me, by reflected glory, semi-semi-famous.

2)      Panic-stricken. I’ll have to answer the questions. Worse yet, I’ll have to sound like I know what I’m talking about.  If I knew what I was talking about, I wouldn’t be writing fiction, would I?

Panic is a useful response in situations that call for immediate action, say something along the lines of encountering a skunk in your backyard, or getting caught in the crossfire between two opposing armies. But it’s a total waste of adrenalin in interview situations. Running around my living room hyperventilating won’t make me sound any smarter, or even more self-assured.

Now, we live in the age of the internet, which, as we all know, has the answer to everything, if one digs deep enough, and avoids distractions such as YouTube videos of talking macaws and blogs written by people sailing around the world on cargo ships, which was why neither Monday nor Tuesday morning produced useful results, unless  I’m asked a question about parrot vocabulary.

On Wednesday, I sat down with my coffee and forced myself to type “author interviews” into the Google search bar. And that’s when I deduced the alien invasion.

The first site I clicked to had so many ads I couldn’t find the damn interview.

The second site I tried opened four new browser windows on my laptop, one of which contained some kind of spinning optical illusion. Closing the windows annoyed me so much, I didn’t read the interview.

The third site was an instant-migraine presentation, red words on a black background.

The fourth site had enough flash to cause epileptic seizures.

The fifth site, which had all the flash ads on one side so I could slide the browser window to the edge of the screen until they disappeared (a trick I learned when I got a Gmail account), looked promising, until a recording of some guy (obviously unaware of my age) tried to convince me to invest in his retirement fund.

And so it went for the remainder of my allotted research time on Wednesday. Eventually I found some useful interview questions (and even better answers, which I plan modify enough to avoid plagiarism) and uncovered the nefarious alien invasion plot. Here’s how it works:

Even as I type, generation ships filled with octopoidal life-forms  are hurtling toward earth at sub-light speed. How do I know they’re octopoidal? Well I don’t, but I’m pretty sure they’re not bi-lateral, and I like typing the word octopoidal (which isn’t really a word because I couldn’t find it any online dictionary).  

You see, bi-lateral beings think in opposites, right and left, black and white, yadda-yadda. A close examination of the advance-propaganda campaign the aliens are beaming into our web servers has convinced me they are taking advantage of our bi-lateral brain structure to confuse us with what we believe is advertising, but is, in fact, an avalanche of conflicting and meaningless hype, designed to push us into a zen-like, one-hand-clapping state of mental overload, rendering us helpless to organize a defense. They, with their multi-lobed brains, are accustomed to cluster-thinking and therefore immune to the effects of their own propaganda.

The alien landing has been carefully timed to coincide with the appropriation of all eyeball real-estate on the internet by flash graphics promising one of the following:

·         a flat belly

·         designer knock-offs

·         hot Russian babes (Which makes me wonder if the Russians already know about the octopoidals and ended the cold war as a ruse, to ensure we have more time to surf the internet.)

 Based on my investigations last week, I estimate they’ll be landing any day now.

What can we do to defend ourselves against this dastardly attack on our eyeball space? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve started blocking every website I encounter with excessive advertising or flash graphics. When the aliens land, there will be at least one woman defiantly shaking her fist at the marketing mother-ship.

Of course, this means I won’t be able to watch anymore parrot videos on YouTube. Damn. 

An Unforeseen Hazard of Continuing Education

I am the worst ringer in my hand bell choir. This is not because I’m tone deaf or mentally subnormal. It’s because I never learned to read sheet music.

Until I started ringing, my only encounter with sheet music happened in grade school. A teacher, whose name and face are long forgotten, although the memory of her wooden ruler still stimulates synaptic traffic, drew five lines on the board, then scribbled dots on the lines and sang doh-ray-me-fa-so-la-tee-doh.  Being something of a musical prodigy, doh-ray-me was hardly a challenge for me.  I’d been singing along with Hank Williams and Fats Domino on the radio ever since I discovered my vocal chords. I only had to hear a tune once to remember it, so didn’t pay any more attention to music lessons. While I waited for my classmates to figure out the tune (so I could hear it) I drew ponies on the fly leaf of the song book. (They were a particular passion of mine between the ages of seven and nine, when I finally sat on one and the infatuation died. )

Through the remainder of grade school, including five years in the school choir and a one year stint with a city-wide children’s chorus, no one ever discovered my shameful secret.  I learned to play guitar by listening to records. The doh-ray-me method enjoyed a short comeback as a way to record melody lines for the songs I wrote, provoking gales of laughter from the studio musicians who worked on my demo tapes.  Other than this blow to my ego, I survived sixty years as a musical illiterate with no ill effects.

Then, about a year ago, my friend Wen tricked me into joining a beginners hand bell choir by assuring me the ability to read sheet music was not a prerequisite. She didn’t lie. Wen’s a very honest person. Strictly speaking, it not necessary to read sheet music to join a hand bell choir. It is only necessary if you want to ring the damn things.

At first I wasn’t at too much of a disadvantage, even though everyone else in the group was either a choralist or pianist or some other kind of ‘ist for whom musical literacy is a requirement. Hand bell sheet music is not the same as regular sheet music. For one thing, the dots (the technical term for these is notes) are written in configurations regular dots don’t normally assume. For another, all kinds of odd notations have been invented to document bell-related techniques for different ways to ring and stop ringing (technical term: damping). It was a learning curve for everyone and my illiteracy went relatively unremarked in the general kafuffle of matching new notations to new physical skills. It was further obscured by Terry, the choir director, who wisely concentrated his training efforts on those more likely to benefit from them.

I noticed that the big bells rang fewer times, so staked out my turf at the low end of the bell table. Initially, this seemed like a mistake, because it turned out there were two sets of lines (technical term: staffs) and my bells were on the lower one (technical term: bass staff) where the doh-ray-me method doesn’t work. I was forced to learn the names of my notes – G and A – and what they looked like on the page.

As time passed, my decision to stake out the big bells bore fruit. With only two fairly infrequent notes to worry about, I gradually began to acquire a dim understanding of things like time signatures, note values, sharps and flats, rests and repeats, and the all-important frowny-dot,  which means look at the conductor.  I was still the worst ringer in the group, but  the gap never widened much.

Then, last week, Terry handed out sheet music for a song I’d never heard before. It was in 6/8 time, which I’d no idea how to count; had two page turns, which are not easy when both hands are full of bells; and worst of all, there were G’s and A’s in every bar. I panicked.  Ignoring Terry’s general walkthrough of the piece, I concentrated on my two precious notes, reading through each bar slowly and carefully.  Just as I was starting to relax, Terry moved Wen, who had been playing the station on my right, to a different location.  This meant I had to move up to Wen’s station. Before I could even get started panicking, Terry counted us in.

In 1990, a psychologist named (slightly redundantly) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  published a book entitled Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I read it a few years later during the pursuit-of-happiness phase of therapy. To oversimplify, and with apologies to Mihaly, a sense of extreme well-being is experienced when people are performing a challenging task at a high level of concentration with a definite goal and getting immediate feedback. At these times, a person becomes part of the task rather than standing outside it. They have a sense of control without striving for control. Their sense of self disappears, their sense of time alters, and they are in a state of flow. There was some pooh-poohing about the validity of this theory at the time. Today, I am pleased to announce, based on personal experience: flow absolutely exists.

I picked up my two new bells. I got the first bar right, mostly by accident, since I wasn’t sure which bell was in which hand. I got the second bar right, boosting my confidence. Suddenly, my universe collapsed into the B and C dots on the page. I couldn’t hear the other ringers anymore. My hips started rocking with the one-and-ah  two-and-ah rhythm of 6/8 time. I stopped ringing the bells and became the bells, sounding out in an eternal, joyous now. I don’t remember turning the pages, but I must have, because I didn’t miss a beat. At the end of the piece, when we got to the frowny-dot over the last note, I looked at Terry and held my B-bell aloft like an Olympian bearing the eternal flame.

The outside me just smiled. The inside me was higher than Alan Watts on a research grant. This euphoria lasted right up until I realized I had – finally - learned to read sheet music.

Now what excuse will I use for being the worst ringer in my hand bell choir?

Social Not-working

I am sitting in the Dancing Blueberries café, nibbling away at the salad I’ve ordered as an excuse to have their scrumptious Dutch apple pie for dessert, when a young couple approach the table beside me. He is a sturdy man with the knife-blade nose and heavy eyelids I associate with Korean or Mongolian ancestry. She has the just-this-side-of-emaciated physique favored by bulimics and runway models, dramatically displayed by a (very) little black dress and a clutter of chunky jewelry. They are both clutching cell phones.

As they take their seats, she glances toward my table. Her eyebrows engage in a short conflict of emotions as pity (for me) attempts to pull them down while relief (that she is not in this situation herself) tugs them up. Embarrassment performs a flanking maneuver on her eyelids and she quickly cuts her gaze away. I know this look. I once wore it myself when encountering solitary, elderly diners in white-linen restaurants. Her pity is wasted on me, though. After decades of practice, I’m quite comfortable eating alone and no longer feel the need to hide out at the back of Burger King with a whopper and fries when I don’t feel like cooking. I take another bite of designer greens dressed in raspberry vinaigrette and go back to reading about the formation of the Han Dynasty in John Keay’s wonderful A History of China.     

My eyes have barely repositioned themselves on the page when the man’s phone rings. It has one of those aggressive rap ringtones set to a deafening decibel level. He could be hard of hearing, but I think it more likely he just wants everyone within a half-mile radius to know how cool he is. He allows the phone, a hefty Blackberry, to keep rapping while he reads the caller ID before deciding not to answer it.

The waitress delivers menus to their table and starts asking what they’d like to drink. She is interrupted by the opening bars of Für Elise, played on what sounds like an xylophone, emanating from the woman’s blood-red iPhone. It’s a text message, and obviously one of great importance, because it requires an immediate response. The woman taps away at the screen keyboard with long thumbnails that are the exact same color as her phone. The waitress turns her attention to the man, but another burst of rapping snags his attention, and he too begins texting.

Just as I insert a forkful of shredded beets and carrots into my mouth, the waitress decides to fill in her wait time by asking me how I like my salad. (I used to think “Bad Timing” was a required credit at the Waiter’s Academy, until a waitress friend pointed out that people go to restaurants to eat, which pretty much guarantees their mouths will be full most of the time they are in one.) We chat until social networking has subsided at the next table and she can take their drink orders.

The ringing and texting, interspersed with bouts of web surfing by the woman as she waits for her dinner companion to finish texting, continues throughout the rest of my meal. At first I find this annoying - mostly the ringtones, since texting and surfing are silent activities. But then I become intrigued. I stop trying to read my book, but keep it open to pretend I’m reading, while I listen to the couple at the next table. (I do not consider it eavesdropping if one is in a public place and people are speaking loudly enough to be overheard without the listener having perform any overt gesture, such as cupping an ear or leaning closer, to make out the words.)  In the intervals when both parties are available to converse, I hear enough to determine they don’t know much about each other and deduce they are probably on a first date.

Now, I’m the first person to admit times change and usually for the better. But in the case of dating, I’m not convinced we’re making progress here.

Admittedly, a cell phone and an active social network are excellent devices for avoiding the awkwardness of a first date. Back in the Stone Age, when I found myself sharing a bistro table with some less-than-promising troglodyte I met through a friend-of-a-friend, I certainly would have welcomed any excuse to ignore him. But I can’t help wondering: how do romantic relationships between the socially-networked develop? Do they friend each other on Facebook, or read each other’s blogs to learn what they haven’t got time to talk about? What is the new etiquette of sex? Should the question “was it good for you?” be tweeted or texted from one side of the bed to the other?

I finish my pie and coffee, close my book and get up to leave. The woman casts a last, pitying half-smile at me. I toss her one right back. After all, I’m not the one who got all dressed up to be ignored.

Galley Slave

Yesterday, along with his new year’s wishes, my friend JR sent his writing pals this quote from Steven King:

"At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style... but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic."

You’d think a writer who has successfully completed at least three drafts of a 112,000 word manuscript would have a more realistic take on the writing process,  wouldn’t you? But we must make allowances for JR. He is one of those annoying optimists whose glass is not only half full, it’s half-full of stuff like pink lemonade and Remy Martin V.S.O.P.

If he’d sent this quote two weeks ago, I’d probably have shot back this third definition of the word magic from Webster’s:  the art of producing illusions by sleight of hand.  This is because two weeks ago I was slumped over the keyboard in despair, unable to come up with a gimmick to perk up a flaccid protagonist in my second novel, convinced I had no skills whatsoever, let alone learn[-]ed ones.  This is still a possibility, but seems less likely in light of a recent event.

Two days before Christmas, there was a knock on my door. I was in the shower at the time, so ignored it. No one was expected, and it’s been a few decades since I looked good in a towel.  I heard the screen door open and had an Alfred Hitchcock moment trying to remember if I’d locked up the night before, but whoever it was just dropped something on the doorstep and left. I assumed it was Santa’s Flyer Elf again. He’d been coming around so frequently during the month of December, with increasingly huge bundles of newsprint suggestions for gift ideas, that’ I’d moved the recycling box into the living room to avoid having to trudge out to the back shed every day.  But it wasn’t the Flyer Elf after all. It was the FedEx man, and he’d left me a package from the publisher.   

Communications from the publisher are very similar to parcels postmarked in Beirut; they should be opened only after diligent examination. The publishing process is something of a roller coaster ride for a debut author, and I have learned not to assume everything arriving from Penguin  will be cause for celebration.

I squished the envelope cautiously and detected, with relief, the outlines of two books.  My editor, Danielle, had previously sent me a book she thought I’d  enjoy.  Ripping open the parcel, I pulled out a paperback with a bright pink cover. (For some reason, pink is the preferred jacket color for women’s fiction.)  Then I had one of those blank, static-y episodes that happen when reality doesn’t match my perception of it. Every neuron in my brain, including the ones normally devoted to tasks like vision and muscle control, scrambled around frantically, trying to achieve a inner configuration that matched the outer world. Fortunately, I was standing in front of an armchair at the time and managed to avoid injury.

When sufficient neurons were once again available for coherent thought, I realized I was holding !MY BOOK! – well actually, the galley of  !MY BOOK!, which was a reasonable facsimile thereof, complete with a pink cover,  fancy chapter headings, blurbs on the back, and weirdest of all, my name at the top of every second page. (Technically, this is called an advanced reading copy, or ARC, because it's properly bound with the real cover, but "ARC Slave" isn't a catchy title.)  

The other book turned out to be Penguin’s 2011 Summer Catatogue, with a note from Danielle clipped to the front, instructing me to check out page 30. I did, and there I saw !MY BOOK!, along with some intoxicating verbiage like “Baker is an exciting new voice” - a statement applicable to every debut author which in no way detracted from my pleasure at reading it.

While there are many benefits to living alone, one of the problems I face is not having someone handy when I have good news to share. This isn’t a usually a big problem for a pessimist, but on this occasion, I really needed a squeal, so I called Wen, my long-suffering  and life-long friend. She listened to me burble away until I was all burbled out, then we made a date to go see a movie the following Tuesday.

That day, I sat down at the keyboard with new confidence. You do have skills, I told myself. You are a real writer. You can do this. Go Bren! And go I did, at the rate of 2,500 words a day for over a week now.

I don’t know how long the high of getting the galley will last. (Hopefully, at least until the first reviews come in. That’s why publishers print galleys, you know, to give to reviewers.) But while it does, I’m going to be here at my desk every day, typing up a storm, enslaved by the conviction I am a real writer.  

My protagonist is still flaccid, though. Wonder what advice Stevie has for situations like this.