I heard a commentator say “the future is analog,” and it struck home with me as a wonderful aspirational message. It may be a cliche, but in so many ways the art of personal connection is lost in our increasingly digital world of communicating. Instead of in-person meetings, we opt for video meetings, and instead of video meetings, we opt for phone calls. In written communication, we moved from emails to texts or Tweets. Each step along the way, our communication lost fidelity. It is said that over 80% of communication is body language, but in the digital sphere, we loose most or all of that non-verbal context and meaning. Even in a video call, we miss many of the non-verbal cues. During the COVID shutdown, our company hired people in remote areas, and our sole contact was via video calls. As we started to emerge from our isolation, I hosted a meeting of one of our teams, and I was shocked to learn that one of the women I had only “seen” online for nearly two years, was actually over six feet tall. Even with the visual media of a video call, the human context was lost.
This is not a blanket indictment of digital communications. On the positive side, digital tools have made it easy to maintain lasting connections. Those of us that went to college or high school before the digital era have mostly lost touch with the majority of our friends from those days, but not so for the generations that were born digital. Millennials easily remain connected with people throughout their past and all over the world. Because it is so convenient and easy, we can message anyone, anywhere, anytime, without consideration of time zone or fear of interrupting the recipient with a phone call or a visit. There are clear benefits to digital communications that we cannot imagine ever giving up. So, digital connectivity is necessary, but is it sufficient or is it enough?
The most evident shortcomings are in sales and customer support. A manager asks a born-digital sales person to call a prospect. When they ask how the call went, the sales person responds by saying they emailed the prospect, and have not heard back. A customer needs assistance, so they try online support with a chatbot, then in frustration they find a support phone number, but the vendor has eliminated live support, so the customer is met with an automated call system that creates more frustration than solution. Avoidance of personal contact has become the norm instead of the exception. A somewhat disturbing trend is the emergence of AI driven automated platforms that initiate and/or follow up customer and prospect engagements. These systems ensure systematic contact, but by pretending to be a human interaction, they are truly taking the human touch out of the loop. Similarly, AI-driven digital notetakers are becoming the norm in video meetings. These can be effective tools, but often they are just a means to create a compressed shortcut to capture key phrases and sentiments, stripping out all of the human context. It is not uncommon for an invited attendee to send their digital notetaker to a meeting, even if they are not present or currently distracted. Not only is it offensive to the live participants to be monitored by a digital presence, it is one more step toward dehumanizing our interactions.
Even in our daily non-work lives, news and political discourse has evolved to narrow curated channels with “broadcast” social media defining our information bubble, and creating vast digital divides between opposing sides. Instead of meeting “the other,” we allow the digital flow of opinions to demonize them. I heard a congress person lament that “85% of the time, we actually agree on the issues, but everyone focuses on the loud 15% where we disagree.” Not sure where the percentages come from, but the sentiment is directionally correct. With civil, in-person discord, we generally can find many areas of commonality, but relying solely on digital communication exaggerates the 15% that divides us. It is much harder to be angry in person than it is to do it digitally.
As we enter the new year, I am optimistic that ‘the future will be analog.’ What I mean when I quote that commentator is that we will once again discover the power of direct human interaction. I do not expect we will discard the digital tools, but I am hopeful that we augment our digital channels with analog connections: face to face meetings, live phone calls, and more fulsome written communication than Tweets or texts. There is a saying in sales that people buy from people. It is the trust that is built with personal interaction that leads to a sale. In customer relations, a positive, human services interaction will build lasting loyalty that a chatbot will never accomplish. The more we get to know each other, the more we discover our commonality and build rapport. Humans are analog beings and we need to re-learn how to communicate with each other as such. Happy New Year!