Friends, subscribers, fellow humans,

We’ve reached a pause. One year. What a year.

I came up with this idea for sharing weekly content in late summer/early fall of 2019. I didn’t see anyone talking about communication as I was envisioning and I was looking for an outlet. I wanted to write for an audience even if I didn’t know who that audience was, or is. A newsletter about communication seemed like a good idea and I am very glad I tried this project. It was a challenge and I treated it as such.

Before I started Spark the Fire, I figured that after a year of writing the worst I’d be is closer to my book draft. I am certainly much closer but also think this year’s effort was a moderate success.

So, this edition marks the end of this newsletter in this current form. I will be pausing from sending you anything for some time as I have a book draft to complete. This is my main writing goal for 2021. These last 12 months taught me the challenge it is to get my own mind around these difficult ideas and package them in a way that will engage people. That has been much of the work of these last 12 months. I believe what I’m working on is going to be great.

I hope you’ll stay subscribed because you will hear from me again, just not for a little while and not in the form of a weekly article. When the book moves along, you’ll hear from me. The ideas that I’m choosing to include in my book draft will be far better served in book form than they were chopped up in a weekly newsletter.

Have a comment or some ideas of things I should write about? Any quirks about communication you’ve noticed? Feel free to send any smart observations to me at [drn [at] davidrnovak.com]. Something you’d like me to pontificate on? Or shut up about? Let me know. I might even listen to you.

I appreciate the accompaniment on this little newsletter endeavor. I hope you found it useful or thought provoking. I look forward to sharing more and am grateful for you’re interest. I think I’ve got a couple of fun tricks up my sleeve. I hope you’ll stick around.

Signing off for now,

DRN

12/29/2020

Good communication is built on 4 pillars: respect, authenticity, trust, and honesty. With all four of those, communication can flourish. This does not mean that all 4 of these must be present at all times for communication to work well or be decent. Or even happen. Bad communication is likely in the absence of those four. Replaced by their alternate forms.

In any relationship, if you have these things, obviously don’t let them go. If you’re relationship — your communication — doesn’t have these things, it’s probably what you should be working towards or thinking about abandoning ship.

I have not the capability or wordspace to fully address these in any sort of complete way but I do want to address them because it’s where we should be going. These things are essential to good communication. People bleat about “Just communicate!” but it’s not that simple. If you don’t have yourself a bubble of respect, “authenticity” — which is quite a problem in itself, trust, and honesty…well, I fear it may not be likely that things go well. It always depends with communication, but without the big four, surely success is less likely.

Respect

Respect comes first. There’s a reason Aretha sang that song. Without a baseline of acceptable respect for the other person’s humanity, good communication is either not possible or doomed to fail. That is, you might hang on in a decent enough relationship for a time, but if respect crumbles, your relationship is as good as dead. There’s no way around it. We show respect through how we communicate. We have to listen. We have to use language that recognizes and does not erase others. We need to allow others to talk, to say what they think, and to agree that people can interpret how they wish. Agreement itself is not a given, individual interpretation is. Showing respect usually gets respect in return. Where does respect start? How do you claim respect when none is afforded to you? These are much more challenging questions.

Authenticity

Authenticity is a tricky wicket. We know it when we see it or feel it, but extraordinarily hard to pin down. Authenticity grows from experience and comes out in people’s abilities to express and mold their experiences into creations that other people — for whatever reason or reasons — seem to identify with.

Authenticity occurs and shifts across all kinds of relationships — from our interactions with new people to artistic performances to the believability of corporate communiqués. Authenticity can also be wielded as a weapon which gives it an interesting double-edged nature. Authenticity can drive and move people, but allegations of non-authenticity can haunt. These understandings and labels can be very hard to shake or resistant to change and quite damaging when wielded falsely. Who is to say what is authentic and what is not. Yet, we seem to know and be drawn to authenticity.

What is authenticity? Hell if I know, but I know it’s important.

Trust

Everyone everywhere is talking about trust. There’s a lack of trust in institutions. Nobody seems to trust each other. Often with good reason. I can’t imagine why people can’t trust others when there seems to be selfishness around every corner.

Selfishness is the opposite of trust. Ego. Ignorance. Perceived infallibility.

This is what erodes trust.

Trust is the infrastructure on which relationships are built but strangely, a lack of trust isn’t necessarily bad, surely less than ideal but not nearly the end of things.

You can communicate without trust. But the outcomes are likely not nearly as good as they could be.

Honesty

Honesty is fundamental to good communication. Lies, deception, disinformation can be successful — they can achieve their purpose — but they can’t be “good.”

Repeated honesty builds trust.

Without honesty, trust deteriorates. Dishonest communication cannot be relied on for long-term success. I do not see how there will not always be room for honesty and the vulnerability that comes along with it, but we cannot assume honesty, because people are slippery and strategic. For a relationship that will last, endure, and show resilience, honesty and forthrightness likely have their place.

Some cultures or individuals may be more or less direct with others. Directness and honesty are not the same thing.

—

These are the big four. The pillars that underlie good communication — which is what we’re after. Aim for the good though you will not always get there.

Communication is profoundly common and mundane. Nothing could be more ordinary. Yet connecting with others is sacred.

Paradox.

We give some of ourselves to them. They give something back. We create something new. Or maybe we reinforce something we already have. Or we grow in a new direction. Make some new meaning. Or plant a seed.

Communicating is never just one — or, necessarily all, of these things. Sometimes, for example, conversations are doomed to die and will never be more than routinized exchange. Imagine a car dealership salespitch. Or what it’s like to haggle over the price of something at a market. (This can actually be quite fun.) These are communication, but they’re only going to be how they’re going to be. It’s highly unlikely you’re going to become friends with the car dealer or have tea with the guy you were haggling with. But, you might actually. Tea is far more likely in many places than friends with your car dealer is likely to be…just about anywhere, I’d guess.

In 2011 on my first evening during a trip to Marrakech, Morocco, I headed to the Jemaa el-Fna, a wondrous cultural space of performers, storytellers, hawkers, and various travel con men by day which grows into a delectable food market at night. The night market grows alive and dissolves into the city each and every evening in a feat of production and coordination.

On this first night, I walked up and down the stalls, soaking it in but mostly calculating the best food to eat. I decided on Moroccan sausages with onions and bread. I drank raibi — a common yogurt drink. After eating, I meandered over to the performances, games, and displays to people watch. To flaneur. Men with monkeys and snakes, dancers, performance artists, scammers. I watched people play a game where you could fish for 2-liter bottles of soda. Pay a few dirham, hook a bottle, everyone wins.

As I stood there watching kids play, a man approached me and introduced himself. We talked about the game Where are you from? When did you arrive? How long are you staying?

Despite having my guard up a bit about possibly being scammed, it quickly seemed he didn’t want to sell me anything so the conversation continued. His English was excellent which was great because now I had someone to answer my questions: What do I need to eat? I ate these amazing sausages already. Where should I go see? Local perspective is always invaluable. It’s a way to learn much, very quickly.

After my questions about what to see and eat, he asked if I tried Moroccan Tea yet. I had not. He asked if I was interested in walking to a rooftop cafe terrace 50 meters for tea. You mean I can see all the square action and drink fresh tea with a local?

“Sure. Let’s go.”

So we did. We sat at the rooftop cafe for 45 minutes or so and drank our tea. Chatted. He was born in Marrakech, but had studied and worked in France. Biology, if memory serves and he had worked in healthcare in France for a while, but had returned to Morocco. At that time, he was having a difficult time finding work in his field due to a lack of healthcare jobs in his area in Morocco. We talked about mint tea and the sugar cubes. We talked about what it was like to living there, and living there compared to France.

He asked about me. American professors by way of The Netherlands don’t end up in Marrakech everyday, so I was a relatively interesting character to talk to. Why was I there? What did I teach? What was The Netherlands like (compared to France)? How are Dutch people weird? 75 minutes. “It was really nice to meet you.” Eventually, a handshake and back into the vapors of a memorable night.

Many questions come to mind. Is this a relationship? I like to think so. It was, at least for the brief time it existed. Now, the memory serves me well. It was nice communicating when it happened.

Looking back to that moment, I cannot shake the thought that there is something sacred there. Well, the possibility exists. This just happens to be one of those situations which may or may not be fairly normal. Mint tea with a stranger? Could go either way on the normalness scale. Night in Morocco? Fairly unique. Unless you’re Moroccan.

Sitting around talking and listening and exchanging symbols over tea with one another — that is, when we’re communicating — in all the ways we do, are our relationships. That’s them, being formed. They might not last long. Like uranium, relationships decay, sometimes quickly.

I don’t think a conversation has to be particularly notable for it to be sacred. Every interaction is sacred in some tiny way. Every conversation a chance to recognize and learn and appreciate from another. It’s sharing. It’s learning. It’s changing. It’s all of these things at once. Communication doesn’t always feel this way, but the best communication does. It’s when you can feel the hum, the flow, the groove, and grow the tendrils of connection with another.

There’s a flip side to this sacredness, of course. There’s no guarantee that you’re not being sold a tour of a model Berber home complete with actor family and 2 year old calendar on the wall. Plenty of communication is mundane, routine, and has had its soul directly sucked out. Customer-service calls are 7th level of hell. Chatbots aren’t likely to be much better. Sacredness isn’t about the outcome of communication per se, because the outcomes are often decidedly not sacred.

It’s in the moment. It’s the raw appreciation and respect for the person across from you. A recognition of their humanity. Of what they have to say and think. This is entirely communication. Conversing. Interacting — over some period of time — as much or as little as that might be.

Something about the free and easy conversation on that Marrakech night has stuck with me all these years later. I don’t recall his looks or his features. I didn’t take a photo. I only recall he was a good person to sit and share a small scrap of time and some mint tea with. If a long past night in Morocco can be thought of as this way, how can we recognize and respect the sanctity of the person across from us in the relationships that surround us every day? We can get numbed by communication’s everydayness. This blinds us. The everydayness numbs us. The capacity for recognizing the sacred in the everyday is in us.

Artwork: Gravitational Waves. Image: © NASA.

[[Author’s Note: This week’s article is a little out there — even in comparison to some of my other oddball ideas. I recognize this. If it’s not for you, I get it. How far can the boundaries on ideas bout communication be stretched? I love physics as well as communication though I know far more about the latter than the former. I am nonetheless curious about how the two might play together. Please keep the experimental nature of this work in mind as you read.]]

What in the world does physical spacetime and the infinity of the universe have to do with human communication?

What the hell kind of question is that?I don’t fully know, but I’m asking it.

It’s a question that hasn’t been pondered by that many people (at least not to my satisfaction). And while I’m certainly not discounting the number of social scientists out there that have incorporated either space or time into their work, I’m not talking space or time, or even space AND time.

I’m talking spacetime — as in that of the physical universe.

How out there can we get?

Messages travel through time. Imagine a lost letter. Or a voicemail that is saved beyond a person’s death. Video messages for birthday celebrations that will never be shared tucked away on the cloud somewhere. Or sometimes — in the case of surprise death — a small note someone left behind, an article of clothing, or an artifact.

Even seemingly mundane communications — tweets, emails, videos, Instagram photos — are actually both suspended in spacetime (from when and where they were created/sent) and travel through spacetime (to the person receiving them) to create meaning.

The point of arrival is different than that of origination.

Where were you when I wrote this sentence? Where are you now that you’ve received it? When and where has communication taken place? Multiple people, multiple instances, and so on.

When is communication happening again? I told you it was weird. In physics, Einstein referred to this as “spooky action at a distance.”

Communication is kind of the same thing.

Wormholes. Blackholes. Communicational waves. Ripples through our perceptions of the spacetime continuum. How might what we know about physics and spatial reality shape our understanding and appreciation of how it is that humans communicate? What are the relationships between the physical universe and humans jabbering? This is unexplored gap of conceptual territory that we grow increasingly able to ascertain and assess what with all our technological advances.

The Expanse Can’t Be Contained In One Small Dollop

I suppose my introduction to physics — beyond, you know, gravity — was Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time which I read in high school. I still have my original copy. I’ve since read many other books — by Carl Sagan, Katie Mack, and Chris Ferrie (click Ferrie link, get joke). I read about digestible snippets about the physical universe: quarks and strings and event horizons. I don’t understand much and I’ve remembered only a few things. The math of such endeavors is comically (cosmically?) past me.

Infiniteness, common in among both the physical universe and communication is the first place where we might imagine Hawking or Sagan might be able to sink their hooks into the realities of communication. Human communication is submissive to the laws of the physical universe. You’re email isn’t getting there faster than the speed of light. That said, the possibilities of what meaning might come out of any given interaction is — much like the expanse of space — infinite. Two people can go anywhere. They can expand in any direction. In that relationship, any meaning is possible.

Communication does not occur in any sort of one-directional or standard way and is far more like wormholes and string theory than we realize.

Human abilities to make meaning are infinite. No beginning. No end. Only on and on it goes. In all directions. A giant golden donut.

Wormholes & Multiverses

I don’t know the cutting-edge thinking from astronomy and quantum types about theories and ideas of wormholes, but I do know that when it comes to people communicating, wormholes exist. Any communication occurring via technological delivery methods or simply the passage of time (if time even exists) essentially leaps through spacetime via a worm hole.

Information and intended meaning go in on one end and come out somewhere else. You can pick up a 200 year old book and communicate with the dead. A message might not land until well after it is sent. You can slip into a digital play third space and co-occupy multiple meaning-making spaces at once.

Any distributed message goes into a wormhole of sorts. A message can goes in at one place and come out at many others, meeting separate individuals where they are, each in a moment of spacetime all their own — with its own conditions, circumstances, and features that make communication more or less likely successful.

Meaning doesn’t necessarily follow immediately after something is said. Sometimes, the meaning from a message might resonate multiple times, over time — even long stretches of time. Sometimes, the ring of the bell doesn’t strike you until years later.

So, when is communication taking place? Maybe the better question is where is communication taking place. The answers to either suggest the existence of wormholes.

When Two Collide

Black holes and gravitational waves. Power and energy beyond imagination.

In the physical universe when these bodies collide, the waves ripple out through and across the universe. We know because the waves can be measured by scientists. Using an unimaginably complex and precise system of lasers and mirrors, physicists can actually measure the compression and expansion of spacetime right here on earth. Absolutely mad.

It strikes me that two people communicating is a collision similar to this. A conversation happens — that conversation can look many different ways and be an infinite number of things — but it’s a collision and there are ripples. There are at least two “meaning reactions” from any given conversation. Both ripple out. Waves intersecting. The ripples take the form of our love and our hate and our compassion and our humor and our joy and our anger towards the others with whom which we happen to be interacting. There’s always a trace left behind of that wave that ripples through the relationship. Eventually every wave fades.

Like magic. Like physics. Spook action at a distance. Except communication.

What does all this monkey talk about universe and physical reality get us? I haven’t a clue. I didn’t say there was a point. I’m just here writing.

Where are you? What do you think of all this?

See?

There it is.

Perhaps more oddly than most, I am fascinated with channels of communication. Any of them. Do you imagine the methods pirates and naval captains used to pass information around their ships? I have. How did they do so efficiently (or not) during the chaos of battle? Runners? Yelling really loudly? I want to know. What was the everyday banter like on an old naval ship? What is it like today? People on ships were shitting and stinking and under a lot of stress so you know there was fkn weird shit going on.

I’m no military communications expert, but one interesting channel I know sailors used are voice pipes aka speaking tubes. As a I kid, I toured the USS Constitution. A couple of times. My dad is a fanatic of the ship and we toured it as a family multiple times. My partner and I had wedding photos taken outside it because despite not being from Boston, that’s where we were married. Dad still drinks his morning coffee out of a vintage Old Ironsides mug.

On one of those tours as a kid, my dad pointed out the voice pipes which sailors would use to yell orders and commands over distances easier especially while cannons were booming on deck. Voice pipes are still used today.

This guy does have a few additional communication channels at his disposal, however.

Channels are infrastructure and means - an actual physical (or digital) object which shapes how communication will or can go and what happens in it. Every channel has a shape. The information and messages that sent via voice pipes will look and feel one way — with very certain purposes. And what happens in a different channel will be, well, different, with other purposes.

We’re not eating candlelight dinners from opposite ends of a voice pipe.

One Foot On Either Side

Good old Generation X. Old enough to remember life before the internet, but young enough to be fascinated by all the wild technological developments of our lifetimes. I remember when cell phone service was shit and having more than zero games on your phone was a luxury. Yet I get pissed at Siri because she wont do what I want. I also wonder if that Alexa thermostat down the hall really is disabled or if I should just anticipate an settlement check — probably in the form of Bezos Bucks — at some point in my future. “Whoops, sorry we actually recorded all your data. Take this and forget it all happened. Don’t mind us, we were just building your robot overlords.”

I remember first hearing about the internet in 1993. The internet itself was kind of old by then, but just blossoming into the more public, and less DARPA-project, we know it as today. The Information Superhighway. There was a story on Channel One during homeroom class which was how I first learned about “THE INTERNET.”

There were actually quite a few stories about the internet happening in those days and it was a regular topic on Channel One that year. People were talking about it like it was this cool new thing, which it was. These weird packages and booklets from AOL with cds in them started showing up. The computers at Best Buy and Circuit City got better quickly. RAM speeds like you had never seen. 32MB. Crazy times.

The allure of this new channel and what was possible on it, pulled us in. My interest was piqued early after hearing these stories on Channel One and my first ventures onto the internet were shrouded in secrecy and subversion.

When I met the internet, it was by figuring out how to rig up the family computer to the modem, adjusting the modem settings in Windows 3.1 so I could dial in to a computer I shouldn’t have had access to. No small task or feat if you knew nothing about how computers as I did.

Dialing into the internet. Can you hear the sound?

I became privy to the logon information of a friend’s older brother’s friend who went to Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I learned that you could call into a local Chicago number at Illinois-Chicago and get your computer online. I figured out how to dial via the modem, entered the haxored logon information, and bam! I was browsing USENET groups with Telnet commands!

I’m hoping the statute of limitations on my computer hacking has run out.

It wasn’t long before my parents had dial up internet in the house and my internet expanded beyond the USENET groups I found in those early days of unauthorized entry. My hacking days ended.

Oh, by the way, the password was “password.”

We all got email addresses and at some point, this internet really grew into all these new ways to connect with other people. AOL Instant Messenger, IRC chat, message boards, discussion forums. Only later was it social media and many of the technological whizzbangs that you all know and love and hate today. Circa 1998, my internet was Yahoo! Games, tape trading message boards, and music chatrooms.

Things have advanced some since then.

Weird things started happening. Trolling. Flaming. Spam bots. Messages informing you your Aunt had been kidnapped in Guatemala and needed money. Or that you were being contacted to facilitate a transaction for a Nigerian Prince.

Well past these early days I’ve described, there are still message boards and chat rooms, as we would expect, though they’ve certainly evolved. USENET groups were the primordial muck circa 1992-1993. Channels have evolved. The ways and forms of communication have changed and will continue to change. New tubes. And new things built on top of those tubes. What does the future hold?

Interactions Beyond Screens

The amount of human connection that has come to be mediated by screens is truly astounding. Zoomland 2020 amplified this realization, but it’s more than Zoom. Social media, smartphones, smart TVs, gaming platforms, it’s all screens everywhere you look. At my own work station — if I wanted — I could have 6 screens (2 laptops, 2 monitors, 2 phones) or 7 (if I added the iPad). Insanity!

While screens might increase our productivity or make it easier or more fun to connect and do things together, screens are rightly maligned as well. Imagine people sitting around a living room everyone sucked into their own little phone world. They’re interacting but also avoiding those around them. So, are they? There are health risks. But it’s not the screens that drive us away from one another. Quite the opposite actually, they only highlight our fundamental need to be connected. It’s not the technology we’re addicted to, it’s the human at the other end.

Assuming humans manage to eek out existence for a few more decades, we may advance beyond screen technology to more ambient forms. For example, it’s already theoretically possible to communicate interpersonally via some sort of advanced hologram technology. Holograms have already been done “at scale” (E.g. Hologram Tupac at 2012 Coachella) and will only advance or die from where they are now which is well beyond 2012 levels. Technologically-speaking, there’s very little from stopping a “virtual” interaction between two humans who are engaging entirely with immersed digital representations of the other person or other entities.

In the future, plenty of these sorts of interactions will be not with other humans, but with genie-like AI entities that will appear or present themselves — probably to encourage us to buy shit, but also hopefully in creative interactions, guided history, and public solidarity actions.

Digitally co-present, embodied conversations without screens is surely possible. And it will be weird.

Bodies, Implants, and Other Bio-Technological Strangeness

A different, but related new technological direction, involves the addition of tactile technologies and multi-sensory experiences. Wearables and other sorts of body-tactile technologies are likely to be central to the next wave of human communication experiences, but so far science fiction still outstretches reality. It appears likely, however, that the augmentation of human experience will continue. We didn’t stop at inventing eyeglasses.

Our bodies are involved in communication but at the same time our brains and perceptions are also limited in how much information they can sift through at least in their un-augmented state. Certain forms of wearables and ambient technologies are likely to shape how humans are able to sift through, use, and play with all kinds of information. These technologies make wild meaning possible. Again, communication gets weird.

A top 3 crazy episode of Black Mirror for me is the one where couples can rehash previous conversations, playback essential memories, or document evidence of relational wrongdoing via there implanted chip rewind devices. People looping themselves back through experiences, both pleasurable and of jealousy. Revisiting video transcripts wielding past words like a weapon. Obsession over how something was said, the look a person gave, or how others responded.

When you start talking wearables, implants in bodies, and chips in brains the consequences for communication are radical. Things barely imagined. Are our monkey brains capable of handling the exponential increase in weirdness that comes with these sorts of technologies?

We humans cling to the old while embracing the new. Monkeys swinging from vine to vine.

Miscommunication doesn’t really exist.

“What?!! Miscommunication doesn’t exist?! It’s everywhere!” you might be saying to yourself.

Stick with me for a minute.

Miscommunication is little more than a figment of your imagination — an organization of your perceptions by your brain wherein you sense you and another person have not connected, missed each other, or otherwise failed to gain meaning in common.

This surely indeed happens, but it does not mean you haven’t communicated. You have. It just didn’t go that great. It's not miscommunication. It’s just communication that didn’t go well.

It’s an illusion. A smokescreen. Like running into a fence that might feel there, one that you can still get around.

Anytime humans speak to one another meaning is generated, a relationship is created or added to — we’ve communicated. The outcomes can be good or bad, but miscommunication isn’t “not communiction.” Bad communication is communication too. Even when we think communication isn’t occurring — if we’re interacting, communication is happening. Ideal communication is ideal, but that’s the goal, not the reality. Falling short of that isn’t “miscommunication” at all. It’s just communication. That’s how it goes!

MsCommunication?

Ok, so I don’t really believe in miscommunication, but in the wild, miscommunication happens — at least people talk about it like it’s a thing, so let’s deal with that first.

We think we’ve miscommunicated when communicating doesn’t work out as we likely expected it to — which, as a friendly reminder, is just an idea in our heads. Some information didn’t make it over, the whole thing was awkward, you didn’t seem to connect. They weren’t understanding and you weren’t doing much better. Or their interpretation was highly not in your favor. Maybe you used a wrong word or didn’t say something exactly as you wanted to. The look of miscommunication can be quite varied.

The thing is — that even in all these scenarios I’ve listed — you’ve still communicated.

You might be tempted to think that it’s miscommunication when people disagree or people understand things differently. This is incorrect. Multiple meanings is the norm, individual interpretation is a fact. No one is guaranteed understanding. Disagreement and different understandings aren’t even necessarily a bad thing. They can be quite healthy, actually.

Miscommunication is probably best understood as a failure to achieve satisfactory outcomes or as a failure to produce the intended effect, but this is more bad communication than miscommunication. Remember, intent only gets us so far.

Ideally, communication cuts good more than it cuts bad — more happy, joyful, and mutually beneficial than it is not, but communicating can go poorly of course as well. Sometimes for seemingly no reason at all. But just because things haven’t gone ideally does not mean they haven’t gone. I

t’s entirely normal for people to walk away from a conversation with different and perhaps incongruent understandings. Overlap and common understanding is never 1:1. “Miscommunication” is the norm.

Good Vibrations

Good communication has a hum to it, but it can also vibrate — and not in the good way. Communication vibration in this sense is akin to how vibration kills precision machines. Like that, except communication. Communication vibrates at three “levels” (if you want to think that way): information, interaction (aka “context”), and interpretation. These are the insert slots where potential error can be introduced into the communication process.

• Information - the content, facts, experience or information you need to convey

• Interaction - the parameters of the interaction itself aka context

• Interpretation - the universally divine right for all to interpret information as they wish

These look like three nice, neat, distinct categories. In the wild of course, the errors we make when communicating weave in and out of these simple categories and get all jumbled up together.

Imagine a large meeting at a workplace where management is leading a conversation — it looks like a presentation — about how the organization needs to restructure. People will lose their jobs. The whole scenario is already on edge before a word has been spoken. We can think of this as one of potentially many, interaction or context factors — what’s being talked about, the serious nature, the emotional potential. An additional fact is that there was another one of these meetings two years prior. It was spirited but also traumatizing to some. The smells of interactions past hang in the air.

Early in the meeting, the senior leader speaking says, “we anticipate 15 people may lose their jobs or have to drastically change the work they do.” Someone in the back hears “50 people” instead of 15. The information is compromised. The room is big and rumblings start to murmur in the back corner of the room.

Later in the meeting, someone makes an emotional comment about feeling their job is under threat having just gone through this in the last round. There is swearing and accusations. Tension is high. After the hour long session with presentation, Q&A, and audience comments, the meeting ends and people retreat to their desks where even more conversations are had. Additional interpretation happens. (It’s already been happening.) Certain things become clearer. Others get muddied.

Tiny vibrations - the wrong information, incorrect interpretations, “overreactions” (quite a judgemental concept, don’t you think?), and historical precedence all can make communication wobble. Wobble too much, and things fall apart. Vibration is hard to see but it’s there if you look.

We’re at constant risk for “miscommunicating.” So much that it’s far better to accept the “miss” in miscommunication as just part of how she goes. Miscommunication might be bad communication, but it’s communication nonetheless.

One of the worst things you can do with respect to communication is to think about it as nice, neat, simple, straightforward. I know it’s tempting. I know it’s easy, But communication is simply not like this. That communication is linear, direct, and easily moves from A to B, let alone that it happens in facsimile duplication is delusional. Communicating is messy.

There’s a relatively famous/widespread quote attributed to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw found on many an image macro stating “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place.” It’s actually quite the opposite.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has not taken place.

There’s actually doubt whether Shaw said this at all and due to some good internet sleuthing we actually know that it was William H. Whyte, an American writer and journalist, who actually said, “the greatest barrier to communication is the illusion of it in the mind of the sender.” I don’t much believe in “barriers” when it comes to communicating but I’m totally down with that thing about “the mind of the sender.” That actually is where the illusion of communication occurs.

We think we’ve communicated because we’ve stated our point, yet forgotten is the fact that the other person gets to interpret as part of communication as well. They get a say in how communicating goes. To fail to recognize the that others will interpret as part of communicating, is a failure of perspective.

Interpretation ⊆ Communication

At its most fundamental, interpreting is the attaching or attributing of meaning to information. We do this constantly while we are communicating.

When we speak, the other person interprets. When they speak, we interpret. The back and forth is so quick as to be instantly transactional — like it hums with a glow. Concerns such as “did my message get across” pale in importance to this reality.

All this interpreting, unpacking, and organizing of information involves a lot of brain power and much of time and efforts when communicating. Interpretation — and its messiness — is much of the reason why communication is, as it is. It’s in the interpretation parts of communication where what we think of as “miscommunication” happens. It’s only after something’s been said where an interpretation might be noticed as different than intended It’s only here that the “miscommunication alert buzzer” goes off in our heads. Except this isn’t miscommunication at all. It’s just communication. Misunderstanding, for sure. Miscommunication? Nope.

Senders like to think that when they say things, the interpretations are received as intended. This is surely a pursuable ideal, but rarely is this the reality of communicating. Again for those in the back: communication is not direct deposit.

A tricky aspect of interpretation is that it can feel almost random at times. (It often is!)

How many times have you ever said something and then, seeing or hearing their reaction, wondered to yourself “How are they getting that from what I said?” It happens all the time. People interpret in ways that make sense to them.

This is entirely the promise and problem of human behavior.

“One cannot not communicate.”

One cannot not interpret, as well.

I Love Your Brain

Interpretation happens in brains, but communication is bigger than psychology, or biology for that matter. What I mean is: communication is all the stuff that goes on when two brains are connecting through words and language and bodies. It isn’t just psychology. It’s way better.

Brains are important though.

Neurologically speaking, interpretation is fairly instantaneous though it can certainly happen after the fact as well. There’s a whole big field of neurolinguistics that deals with the brain mechanics of interpretation and comprehension. I’m not a neurologist. What I’d like to point out to any non-neurologists out there is that in some sense, chemistry and biology are unignorable because when it comes down to interpretation-in-brains, you can’t escape the chemistry of communication. A whole lot of human behavior comes down to dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin — the good stuff and monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A), an enzyme that breaks down key neurotransmitters which can result in depression and anxiety. Certainly there is far more brain chemistry to communicating than what I can put in 5 sentences.

As we communicate, our brains are always classifying and organizing information — that’s what interpretation is. We turn around and through what we say and do stimulate the interpretation process for others. And they interpret. Because they have brains too. It’s less back-and-forth and more ongoingly instantaneous than the stilted nature of human conversation or language makes it sound. A glowing hum.

Monsters Rear Their Heads Again

Getting into the nuts and bolts of communication machinery as complicated as interpretation means spectres like ambiguity, context, and intent come back into play. Are they nice? Angry? You have to play the game to find out.

The ambiguity of language and the possibility to interpret multiple meanings is entirely normal. People can act ambiguously and be unpredictable as well.

Context and history influence interpretation. No relationship comes from nowhere. Context constantly changes and shifts. And the whole game can pivot abruptly upon a single wild interpretation.

Intent and intention can be taken into account — or ignored entirely, either is fine. Interpreting what was intended may be a measure of good communication, but this also assumes good faith. And intent, as we all know is more complicated than good faith. And don’t forget that interpretation gets wild quickly. Even a simple response of “I’m fine.” to the question “How are you?” contains a lot of interpretation potential depending on context, how it was said, and knowledge about who is doing the saying (and asking).

There’s a lot that goes into interpreting even the simplest statements regardless of their intentionality.

Interpretation — one of communication’s giant, intractable, ongoing problems. Always changing. Always being negotiated. Always multifaceted. Never really done. Yet always part of the whole. Speaking, listening, interpreting. Comprehending and speaking back. More interpretation. And on and on it goes — very quickly. There’s that hum again…

Where is language? Kind of an odd question, I suppose, isn’t it? We have language in common — in that we all do it. It’s a primary mechanism of our interactions. Language is part of communication. But I ask again, where is it?

Language exists in a cloud that surrounds us. It comes from everywhere. The cloud grows around us, we get language passed to us and we absorb it just from being around other humans. Patterns reflect patterns. We hear words, but rarely think about their power enough.

Languages change and language changes. They’re all different. Language preserves the past, expresses the present, and foreshadows the future. But we can also reject language. That is, we all talk in certain ways and not in others. Single humans can operate in language in multiple ways. Code-switching is evidence of this.

Jeff Lichtman, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard who has studied how language works in the brain at the neurological level argues, “Language itself is a fundamentally linear process, where one idea leads to the next. But if the thing you’re trying to describe has a million things happening simultaneously, language is not the right tool.” [1] He’s certainly right about language being an inadequate tool to express things. I’d say that’s generally the case. But language certainly isn’t linear except in our perceptions of how it comes out of us. Language is far more rhizomatic and hierarchical.

Language isn’t the same as communication. Communication is the house, language is the tool. You can communicate in language’s absence.

Language Lives and Breathes

Plenty of people seem to think (or not think, I suppose) about language as static, much like many think about communication strangely enough. In reality of course, both are dynamic.

Language lives, breathes, and changes all the time. As a species we’re always remixing and adding to language as we go. Prescriptivism does not reflect reality. People make up words and create things. Language changes. A few years ago nobody knew what it meant to google anything (our data overlords) or a lick of Dothraki (GoT) or said holy forking shirtballs (Kristen Bell, The Good Place). But anyone can create language and that language might only have meaning within the context of a given relationship or tiny group, but that’s language changing right there.

Language isn’t confined to relationships, it scales up as well. Slogans, portmanteau, pronunciation play — it’s all up for grabs. Ask any rapper. Heck, Shakespeare is still known today in part because he created vast amounts of language including swagger, lackluster, and lonely — W.S. ~The Original Goth.

Language is in all our minds and on our tongues all at once — all of us. We change it and it changes us. It is potential energy — stored in us and used when we reach out — part of our communication attempts to connect in the mechanisms of meaning-making with others.

A Formative Language Experience

As a graduate student, I was able to do research at an organization called Passion Works as part of one of Dr. Lynn Harter’s research teams at Ohio University. I learned more than I could ever articulate, but one essential takeaway for me were some views on language.

Passion Works is an art studio serving the region in and around Athens, OH. I was able to be part of a team studying, helping, and otherwise volunteering with Passion Works as the fieldwork part of a bigger project on art, disability, creativity, and narratives. Our fieldwork consisted of volunteering, creating art, observing, helping, talking to participants. It was loose and creative. Very fun but emotional and reflective as well. Formative for me.

Passion Works’ hook was/is giving people with different abilities the chance to create and connect. All sorts of wonderful, colorful art was created in the process.

[[Art: Hippo by Carolyn Williams - A piece that hangs in my own home.]]

Passion Works was an amazing space to observe. It was raw and controlled and ordered at the same time. Many of the Passion Works artists could speak, though a few did not or were very difficult to understand. Some artists had language ticks that you had to navigate or ignore. Others could articulate why they were voting for George W. Bush or John Kerry — an important topic in Ohio around those times. Some language ticks or tendencies were difficult to impossible to navigate around and every conversation seemed the same — though they were not. Others were like talking to a friend or just being there while someone expressed themselves creatively. I’ve rarely felt care for others as I felt in my hours at Passion Works. Some of that care came out expressed through the language as part of communication.

Though I would generally classify the language elements of communicating at Passion Works as often difficult, this was despite it’s simplicity, and the beauty that came out was undeniable and profound. I have pondered certain fundamentals of human communication many times since those formative experiences — what I thought communication was, changed; my assumptions about how it works, shaken; and my profound belief in what was possible when people connected and acted together; confirmed.

Language doesn’t have to be flowery and colorful or complex to work. Though language certainly plays a major part in how we’re able to accomplish what we do in communication, meaning creation is possible well beyond language.

All these years later, I’m drawn back to those experiences of watching beautiful art come out of a process where communication was obviously flourishing, yet often felt like a struggle. Quite a paradox to reckon with.

So, uh, where is language again? Everywhere. Nowhere. In all of us. Potential energy. A key element of communication but it’s just that — one element. Language is wonderful. Revere it, play with it, have fun with it. But communication is bigger than just language.

Language can shape your reality. Don’t like how something is? Start talking about it differently and watch it and your perception change. Be more positive in your language and see what happens. Try communicating with more care towards others and see what results.

Language can indeed be wholly inadequate to represent experiences which is part of the reason that communication always fails to deliver an exact representation of reality to the mind of a communication counterpart.

People talk a lot about using communication to make people aware of things. “We communicated it to them.” Awareness. What is being aware, really though? It seems to me that awareness is a recognition of some amount of information having moved from a source to receiver. Hopelessly generic. Difficult to measure. And almost surely a sign that a sender mostly wants to claim they’ve told somebody something. A marketer could ask someone if they’ve heard of a product or service and if they say yes, you could claim awareness. But is that really anything?

I suppose it definitely could be, but it doesn’t seem like much. Or at least it doesn’t seem far enough.

Awareness of something might end you — rock your little worldly existence — leave you forever changed. Awareness of other things only serves as a starting point.

As its commonly taken up, awareness is mostly a measure of information transfer. This is my main umbrage with the idea. Communication only begins with information, it doesn’t end with it. And “awareness” in that sense is little more than a vague, gloopy marker of whether some small fragment of information made it from here to there (or not). That’s it.

This seems like a pretty low bar for humans communicating to me. While it is true that the only way anyone ever becomes aware of anything is through communication, I think we should aspire to more. Could awareness be more than just the proof that information has moved from here to there?

Deeper on Awareness

So, at some basic level awareness is information transfer or movement. It is acknowledgement in the brain of someone else of some other thing. Pretty vague.

We should take scale into account. Awareness at scale is one of the main charms of mass communications. At this level, we can actually begin to entertain ideas of message efficiency, spread, distribution, etc. In the future, we’ll probably have eye-tracker sensors that will literally be able to decipher what content it is we have our brains on and have been made aware of. Creepy.

Awareness is at scale, but it is also about the personal. Communication always comes back to the relationship. Interpersonally speaking, awareness can be a serious expression of feelings — someone then truly understands where you’re coming from. Or the point could be important information (“I’ll be by your house in 10 minutes to talk!”).

These sorts of aspects of awareness are completely different than “Hey, I’m aware that a pizza with a hotdog baked into the crust is a thing” or that the McRib is back.

If we’re talking about awareness in a team setting, the meaning changes still. On a team or group, awareness could be thought of as everything that group needs to successfully complet a task. How many teams have you been on where it takes 3 meetings just know what the problem is? These are, in essence, awareness meetings. Everyone gets their chips out on the table so the group can win at this weird collaborative game (teamwork) that we’re playing.

In this kind of context, awareness is like playing chips of information out into the group for all to benefit. The communication game changes as we go yet somehow we manage to stick mostly to the rules, norms, expectations, and conventions of human interaction. The chips put in and played are hopefully done so for the benefit of all team members so that the group may succeed. In reality, we always make decisions with partial information awareness.

Awareness can be outward-looking just as it is inward-looking. Surveying the environment constitutes awareness as well. What are other people out there doing or saying? We’re always communicating, so is everyone else, so it never really hurts to be “aware” of others are doing or saying. This goes especially if you’re hoping to interact with someone but is a good general rule for surveying what’s going on in the human zoo.

And at the end of the day, awareness isn’t really enough. It’s the reaction after the awareness that matters. What behavior or outcome results from awareness? Yet while awareness might never be enough itself, we should recognize that awareness is also the intimate sharing of ourselves with each other. And sometimes, awareness of some small little thing can completely change your view of another person. Awareness can be a switch that flips — the change from which bigger things grow.

Every conversation is like it’s own little game. Awareness isn’t enough, but it can be a start. In and of itself, “awareness” is little more than basic information transfer. But it is from there that meaning can grow, evolution can happen, things can change.

—

Artwork by Dimitri Houtteman from Pixabay.

“I wish that we could talk about it…
…but there, that’s the problem.” ~James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem

Communication is everywhere. We’re not away from it much, if ever. It’s what makes us human. But for as ubiquitous and pervasive communication is, the absence of communication is actually a quite interesting place to look for clues about what is going on when people are communicating.

Thinking about the absence of a thing can make you realize how special something actually is.

We can think about “the absence of communication” in two ways. First, a total absence, as in a sterile vacuum of non-interaction — if such a thing could exist. This is perhaps slightly difficult to imagine as it’s fairly impractical. Imagine two people on opposite sides of the planet or even in the same neighborhood who have never interacted, never spoken, and are impossibly indifferent to the existence of the other. This is communication’s absence. You can call it “disconnection” if you like, but it is in essence a theoretical linkage where communication could exist but does not. There is no relationship there. Very abstract, but exists.

A second idea of communication’s absence is when you have connected with someone in the past — that is, you’ve communicated previously — and then, in a given moment, you are not communicating with them. Maybe you wish you were, maybe not, but the relationship exists however the interaction isn’t there. This is also a form of absence.

Another odd-to-swallow fact is that despite how much time in a relationship we spend communicating, we can’t — and don’t — spend all of it communicating. So a big chunk of our relationships — any relationship — is being apart. It’s separation. Absence, in a way. This remains true despite the fact we are more connected then ever.

We all sit in dense networks of connections and relationships. Despite this, we actually spend more time *not* communicating with the people with whom we have relationships with than we spend communicating with them. At any given time we are likely to be only communicating with one or a few people. There are always many more people we are not communicating with despite having a perfectly fine relationship with them.

The Value of Absence

Communication’s absence isn’t much of question of good or bad because it can be either. We tend to think about absence of communication as bad, but it isn’t, inherently. There are myriad reasons why we might stop communicating with other people and create an absence: there are only so many hours in the day, plenty of people aren’t that nice or fun or interesting, the workday ends and we retreat from those parts of our lives into others.

This whole question of “the absence of communication” is kind of a weird one, you may be thinking to yourself. But keep in mind as you read that absences can be good, it’s a non-obvious idea to get your head around.

To explore absence a little more deeply, let’s talk about few extreme examples of “not communication.”

To The Extreme

So absence is this extreme vacuum but it’s also the creation of a gap where one does not always exist. Sometimes these gaps are normal and others are more extreme, final, or severe.

Death, for example, is a pretty extreme form of communication’s absence. One moment you’re able to have a conversation with someone and make a little meaning and the next moment, you can’t.

There are also a few historical instances worthy of examining to think more about communication voids, absences, and vacuums and the consequences of not communicating.

About 900 years ago, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s — an accomplished guy if ruling over swaths of Europe is your thing — conceived a pretty twisted language deprivation experiment. In this experiment, Emperor Fred ordered an assembly of young infants taken from their families and raised without human interaction. The purpose of the “study” was to determine the original human language. The expected outcome was that by depriving babies of any speaking or “prattling” would result in the discovery of the original language of Adam and Eve. A bit kooky.

We know about all this because of a friar named Salimbeme — who reported on the experiment.

The experiment resulted in all the babies dying.

So much for not communicating.

Another historical, slightly less grim example, is that of Victor of Aveyron, a feral boy discovered in France when he was 12 years old around 1800. Victor — so the story goes — was rejected by alcoholic parents when he was very young and he fended for himself in the wild. He became famous as “the wild boy of Aveyron” where he emerged from the woods on his own January 8, 1800 at the age of 12. He could only grunt, knew no language, and ate only raw vegetables. He later learned how to cook. Victor bounced from orphanage to homes to hospitals and was considered mentally ill and an “idiot” — an accepted psychiatric medical term at the time. He eventually ended up at the French National Institute of the Deaf, despite the fact that he could hear, and was studied, poked, and prodded by many of the interested French doctors of the time.

The scientists thought — through studying and educating Victor — they could better understand a host of matters including how humans adopt and learn language. He, in essence, became an n=1 case study.

It’s not everyday a human walks in off the street with next to no language skills. Victor went on to live for a few more decades until he died. Normal enough for so abnormal, I suppose.

These sorts of cases of absence, while intriguing, are little more than stories at this point. There is, however, one other example of the absence of communication that I would like to talk about and it’s very much real.

Solitary confinement.

I’m no expert on solitary confinement. I’ve never been in it nor do I hope to be. The little I do know about solitary confinement as a punishment form is from movies, both documentary (Last Days of Solitary) and fiction (Dead Man Walking, Green Mile, Shawshank) and reading books. Despite being completely unqualified and uncredentialed in any meaningful way on penal measures, I’m bringing it up because communication is at the essence of solitary confinement in that what is removed via the punishment is the possibility for human connection (e.g, communication).

In the hole is a communication hole, I imagine.

It is this removal of all possibility of human connection and conversation that makes it so philosophically and morally wrong, in my view.

It’s the hope of the spark of communication that delivers one of the best scenes of Shawshank Redemption. The guard approaches Andy’s cell. Andy, who has been in the hole for over a month at this point. The guard says simply, “The kid passed. C+ average. Thought you’d want to know.” Andy smiles in the corner.

There is robust scientific literature establishing the negative psychological effects of solitary confinement and a wide window to argue that solitary confinement is a particularly cruel form of punishment. Humans in solitary confinement are prone to developing mental illnesses ranging from anxiety to depression to self-mutilation to suicidal thoughts [1]. This has resulted in many different organizations — professional correctional, mental health, legal, and human rights organizations — to support the drastic reduction of solitary confinement [2]. United Nation experts amount solitary confinement to torture and the consensus expert opinion is that any isolation exceeding 15 days should be outright banned [3]. In the United States, prisons will have Special Housing Units (SHUs) which is essentially solitary confinement at a larger scale. SHUs keep prisoners in solitary isolation including soundproofing and other tactics to limit communication between cells [4].

Solitary confinement presents a direct attack at the fundamental belief in communication.

A purposeful lack, or cutting off, of communication such as this detracts from the health and richness of the human condition — an involuntary severing of the humane connection between an individual and another. Solitary confinement is designed to instill feelings of futility and is purposed to terrorize, scare, and frighten. And at its core, solitary confinement damages and threatens the process of being human — communicating.

This is a problem. At least I think so.

The absence of communication — and the methods that get us there — leads us to quite some interesting questions and situations as well as moral dilemmas. These are some extreme cases. Not much of anything resembling what absence looks like within the context of most people’s relationships.

Absence Isn’t Bad, Except When It Is

Much of the above is just a thought exercise. The absence of communication within the context and confines of a relationship looks quite different than these examples I’ve presented. When it’s a result of a mad king, feral children, or part of a criminal punishment system, the absence of communication is one thing I suppose. Within the context of a relationship, absence’s features, qualities, and mechanisms look different.

For example, back to this idea that the absence of communication isn’t necessarily bad — except when it is. Absence can be long, troublesome, and anxiety-inducing and it can be short, normal, and agreed upon. Absence of communication can be quite ok and acceptable just as it can be a cause for grief and worry.

Sometimes — separation, absence — is exactly the tactic you should be engaging in. For example, if you’re angry with someone or having disagreement, a temporary break or separation may be exactly what the doctor ordered. Separation — not talking, not communicating, whatever you want to call it — can actually be good for a relationship. Ever taken an agreed upon, fully mutual break from another person — even for just a few hours or a weekend? The result can be healthy.

Humans move on from people frequently and these leavings are judged both good and bad. You can mostly no longer communicate with someone and still maintain a relationship — one that is marked by the absence of communication. For example, I have people who I would call friends and yet I rarely if ever communicate with them. Some relationships are mostly absence. You might only talk once or twice a year or at even wider intervals than that. Your relationship may very well be strong, when you communicate it might be great, and the relationship can be so very satisfying — yet it’s mostly absence. It appears that absence can be just fine and dandy. How strange.

We move on from people and sometimes we realize that not talking to them is better than doing so, and we find ourselves much happier in communication abstentia than we would be otherwise.

The fact is that in any relationship — even the good ones, the ones we maintain — we’re not always jabbering back and forth. Even in good relationships, there’s plenty of time spent not communicating.

The absence of communication is, in a sense, a requirement for a relationship. We can’t communicate with everyone all the time — that’s physically, mentally, emotionally impossible.

It’s mostly low-density space between us it seems. That’s along the lines of what the physicists seem to think about space too. It’s not empty, it’s certainly not always full, but it’s there and it’s doing something.

Artwork: Blue Spot © Bernard Cohen, Tate Gallery, London, UK.

Artwork: Hope II by Heather C. Sweeney.

Emotions are important to communication. But where to start? There’s about a million possible directions, mountains of research from many fields, hundreds of books (some of them even good!), and tons of advice out there about communication and emotion both good and bad.

What is certain for sure is that emotions are central and unavoidable when it comes to communicating. In one way, only lived experience and self-reflection can be your guide. Advice from other people about how to handle your emotions is only going to get anyone so far. So instead of offering advice, allow me to reframe a conversation in order to tease out some of the connections between emotion and communication that may steer a path through some territory that can be personal and complex.

Setting the Stage

Let’s start with a few foundational, basic principles about emotions and communication:

1. Emotions are both a complicated concept and experience. No big surprise.

2. While complicated, emotions can feel quite matter-of-fact, raw, or even primal when they are being experienced. They are personal and intense to whomever is undergoing the emotional experiencing.

3. Emotions can be hard to process and they may not be fully understood by the person experiencing them.

4. Emotions are sort of like whack-a-mole. They may not ever fully go away and if you don’t deal with an emotion, it will just pop up somewhere else.

5. Emotions can be subdued and subtle and are not just the BIG emotions our attention tends to be drawn to (ex. anger). The subtle and subdued are important as well.

6. We express, negotiate, and navigate our emotions through our language, our bodies, and our communication behaviors. This is a very personal, unique process in many ways.

Those are some operating assumptions about human emotions as far as I’m concerned. So, how to get deeper?

Self & Other

To understand emotion better, we can contrast along lines of self — that is, the emotions YOU are experiencing and other — what emotions others may be experiencing (knowing full well you cannot fully understand their experience).

Self and other.

Each arena requires a different perspective, set of skills, and contains different challenges. For example, you can turn your own attention to your own emotion behaviors at any time. You can learn too — through reading, practicing, purposeful manipulation — and change or manipulate your emotional displays (this isn’t easy mind you).

But an associated, related set of behaviors would come through observing and interpreting the behaviors of others. We should pay attention to how others are feeling as well. If you want to be more attuned to the emotions of others, yet other skills and behaviors are required: listening, generally being observant and not self-absorbed care, and so on.

Emotions can get unwieldy big fast in real life and conceptually.

To communicate well of course, you have to think about both your own emotions and behaviors and those of others. And I’ll say this, if you’re own emotions are off the rails, you have no chance of helping anyone else with theirs. Emotions are very much, get your own house in order first type of thing.

Primary | Secondary

We can also think of emotions as primary and secondary. We’re basically in psychology at this point (far too close for my liking). Looking at emotion this way, there are Primary Emotions (5 or 6 of them) and Secondary Emotions (too many to list).

Primary emtions appear/feel more innate, appear for shorter periods of time, and tend to burst rapidly in reaction to some sort of outside stimulus. There are 5 (or 6) of them depending on who you ask. The generally accepted primary emotions are: joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. AKA the 5 leads from Pixar’s Inside Out minus surprise.

Primary emotions are considered primary because they are experienced in a similar fashion across cultures. Scientists have learned that all people — regardless of culture — are able to recognize these emotions. It appears in some instances of communication may be 100% nonverbal.

Secondary emotions — as some refer to them — seem to be not as innate as primary emotions, may or may not have a corresponding facial expression, get processed differently by our brains, and require more computational brain power (thinking) to work through. Example secondary emotions are: love, guilt, embarrassment, shame, pride, envy. Secondary emotions develop and fade over longer timelines, and are experienced in relation to other people rather than in direct response to a stimulus like primary emotions.

A primary/secondary vibe fails to account for is that no emotion feels secondary when you’re experiencing it and that each emotion will in essence manifest into communication in a certain way. Emotions are in brains and bodies but they come out of our mouths (sometimes) and are expressed via our bodies as well. Straight to the humanness in human communication.

Learning About Emotions

How do we learn about emotions?

We learn about emotions through observation of others, trial and error, and the guidance we receive (good or not) from other people. Emotions can be situational, contextual, or even cultural. We react to the emotions of others. If someone we know and like displays behaviors associated with sadness, we’re likely to provide comfort or supporting behaviors. We learn, through socialization and repeated experiences how to read, display, and address emotions. It’s why it’s important to teach kids to pay attention to how others are feeling. It’s totally a skill.

Plenty of people are emotional poison because they didn’t learn anything healthy about emotions. Some people are unquestionably better at reading or expressing emotions than others. Nearly everyone can learn to be more competent about their own emotions and those of others.

Sharing Emotions

To share or not to share?

Emotion sharing is a big deal. But let’s be clear that when we’re just communicating normally, emotions come along for the ride. We’re always sharing emotions. Other people just see them on us. They are part of the communication process. Boredom, excitement, happiness, indifference — they’re always kind of hanging around.

Science shows us emotion sharing has many benefits both for the self and interpersonally [Source]. Emotional sharing increases closeness and interdependence. Individuals get satisfaction and relief from sharing and social bonds become strengthened via interactions that are laced with emotion.

We share emotion purposefully but also unwittingly.

Emotions can be like contagion and spread like wildfire. Good and bad. Laughter is contagious but so is rage. And hatred.

Ultimately, there are better and worse ways to express emotions but context and those around you judge that, not me.

A Little Closer

There are a few ways you can tune your communication to better focus in on emotions. It is important to have an emotional vocabulary. The more specific we can be about expressing (verbally communicating) our emotions and what we’re feeling, the less ambiguous things may be for the person we’re interacting with. Ambiguity can be your friend, but in the spirit of striving for the purest, most authentic experience possible, being more articulate and clear about your emotions is a good thing.

Learning to talk about your emotions is hard and the only way to do it is to practice at it. Better language about emotions helps us express better how we’re feeling. We can talk about intensity for example. I’m not just “happy”, I might be “ecstatic”. I’m not just scared, I’m “anxious".”

Using “I” language helps you own your emotions and focus on yourself. This can help you feel more in control and can help your interpersonal companion not feel defensive or responsible. For example, instead of saying, “You haven’t cleaned anything! It’s driving me crazy how messy it is in here.” you could say, “I’m starting to feel anxious because things are so cluttered, could you help me clean up a little?” A world of difference, right?

Good language about emotions may help you feel like you can take a bit more control over your emotions and how you feel. You can communicate new ways you want to feel into being but processing and managing emotions is no small task. Emotions have to be lived and what works best for you is anyone’s guess.

Final Points of Order

There’s so much there there with emotions and communication it’s hard to tackle a healthy fraction in a single article. I didn’t mention gender, but emotions are gendered and we learn emotions in gendered ways. I didn’t mention technology. Technology undoubtedly makes emotions more complicated.

What about authenticity? Not every emotion is “authentic.” Nor is every emotion worth your time whether it’s yours or someone else’s. Emotions need not be reciprocated. But keep in mind that you’re likely to co-experience the same emotion with the person sharing it. Laughter is contagious, remember? So are other emotions as well.

We become better communicators through becoming more aware of our experiences and expressions of emotions. Emotions are at the core of our being — central to our existence and experience. Humans wouldn’t be human if it weren’t for our emotions: empathy, care, satisfaction but also rage, hatred, and humiliation.

Emotions are both physiological and psychological — that is, they’re connected to both our thoughts and our physical bodies. Emotions manifest through in increased heart rate, tense or excited muscles, chills or dizzying sensations, and a hundred other possible ways. Our bodies become our emotional expressions, sometimes involuntarily — crying, yelling, rejoicing. And at other times, purposeful — ignoring someone, avoiding eye contact, or hugging.

Emotions are indeed a complicated slice of the human communication pie. Important to communication is an understatement. Central to, is more like it. Start improving where and how works for you.

Communication and relationships are the same thing. And thus far, I’ve talked about relationships in mostly 1:1 terms. That is, one person to one person: a dyad. Relationships can be more complicated than just one person to another of course. Start adding more people to the mix and strange things start happening.

As you go from two people up to 3 or 4 or 5 and beyond, much of the dynamic of communication changes. The core is the same, it’s still about sending information and making meaning, but the interaction changes in myriad ways. New things become possible.

The Math

Some of this change is simple math. With 2 people there is one connection and 2 perspectives on that connection. With 3 people, there are 3 direct connections between individuals but also the capability for 2 together in relation to the other (2 v 1) becomes possible. This makes for 3 additional second order dynamics. With 4 people there are 6 connections and even more complex second order relationships. With 5 people, 10 and even more. 6 people, 15 direct connections and so on.

The assumptions of these flat networks hide many things. For example, in reality networks aren’t balanced and neat but rather can be gnarled and funky…like this:

The first graphic also tends to mask the realities of networks as harmonious and unified when in reality, network and groups are often fractured and fragmented — subgroups, cliques and alliances form. Here’s a visual representation. Each color is an imagined subgroup within a group.

It’s pretty obvious that as you start to add people, the communication dynamic changes. Three people do not communicate as two would. We’re still communicating — information and meaning are bouncing around and being created — some of the overall experience is the same, but different things happen. At some size, things get too big and large groups are virtually guaranteed to fracture into smaller fragments. But from 3 people and beyond, something changes. New possibilities are realized. Weird things start to happen. Different outcomes are achieved.

Dynamic Changes

Adding a 3rd person to any two person mix results in a dynamic shift. The context — in many ways — melds and morphs around you when this happens. Ever had a 3rd person join a pair? Or walked into someone else’s conversation and everything go weird? There you go. That’s it. A new communication bubble is formed. Within that bubble, new things happen that didn’t or can’t when it is any 2 of those 3.

Adding people to a dyad is a fun thought exercise but surely not how groups come together when humans are actually interacting. Often, groups of a certain size and combination convene together. As you add people, the dynamics change. Eventually, sometimes your group gets large enough, things even out, and communication hums happily all around you.

Add people, things change. The context may stay more or less the same, but if you’ve ever invited or encountered someone into a group with history, you know what I’m talking about. The change, for a while, is palpable.

New Things Become Possible

Along with the dynamic shifting that goes on as groups grow, there is other good news. New things become possible. Teamwork, for example, certainly not unheard of with two, becomes easier as group networks grow. A new identity might form…could be a sports team or a heavy metal band or tribe of friends or a new start-up business. Competition or collaboration might happen. These can lead to good and bad places. Even divisiveness can begin to occur as soon as the situation involves 3 people. Keep in mind I’m not saying that these things do not exist when we’re paired off, but rather it’s as relationships grow from 2 to 3 to 5 and beyond that we can really see these new things come into blossom.

How, you ask?

There are behaviors, for all intents and purposes, inherent in us humans that need shaping, training, or to evolve away. For example, kids are quite naturally collaborative, inclusive, and playful. It’s the older adults that mess that up (in some cases). In other cases, it’s the older adults (hopefully) parenting those behaviors out of kids. As an example, multiple parents on my block all of whom have similar aged children have noticed that among about 5-6 similar aged kids that play together, any two of them play nicely, but add a third to the mix and the behavior gets wild. Cohesion and happiness seem to fade. 2 gang up on the 1 in the ways that kids do. A good case study for why we should aim early at values and behaviors like inclusivity, cooperation, and problem solving.

Norms, Values, & Behavior Shift

Something else worth mentioning is how the norms, values, and behavior you might not see in dyads come about when the collection is bigger than that. More people mean a group’s values can blossom, shift, and adjust. Going along with the crowd becomes a thing. People’s behavior changes. Individuals within a group buy into — more or less — the group’s overall trajectory, ways of doing things, and purposes.

Leadership might form. People, if motivated, may cooperate. Or may sabotage. Where there’s leadership, there is often resistance. Small groups may try to organize in more equitable and egalitarian ways. Larger groups nearly always rely on leadership persons or structures to manage and move things along.

See how much changes about how we communicate and organize and connect ourselves just by adding a few additional people? Whew.

The core is the same. It’s still about information and meaning, but the landscape of communication feels almost entirely changed. Crazy.

As groups grow, diversities of all kinds increase (ideally) which provides richer resources for the group’s success. But as groups grow, some things about communication, like cooperating, developing consensus, and the amount or volume of communication become challenges. More people likely means more communication. As groups get larger they tend to get more bureaucratic, sub groups form, standard procedures may appear and formalize. This can be good and bad. Standards allow for efficiency, but they also limit and constrict in other ways. Formality and structure have their benefits, but generally structure tends to inhibit people’s sharing and participation.

Things change with communication as we get beyond on the dyad. At it’s core, communication is still what it is — meaning making, information sharing, interaction — a relationship, but similar to crystals, relationships grow and spread and take on new shapes as more individual units (people, molecules) are added to the mix. As communication scales up, we are faced with an entirely new set of problems and possibilities.

A true measure of person is whether they can apologize or not.

If someone genuinely has wronged you — or acted like an asshole — and they can’t or don’t apologize, beware. It’s a giant, swaying red flag.

Everyone has to apologize from time to time. (Or likely should apologize, anyways.) But how best to apologize? Is there one ideal way? Or certain steps that should be followed? My answers are: Let’s talk about it, probably not, and not exactly.

Better apologies are likely to result in stronger relationships. This is interesting given that the need for apologies only arise from moments of pain, fault, sorrow, shame, hurt, and so forth.

Good apologies help relationships grow back stronger.

Rather than thinking about “steps” per se — generally not a good mindset for communication as it’s never one size fits all — it’s more useful to know the parts of a good apology rather than following a formula.

Why apologies? Well, they’re important for one, and two, an apology is a quite pure form of communication in my view. Good apologies are vulnerable and exposed. You admit fault and attempt to assuage guilt. It’s raw and pure — the good ones anyways. Everyone fucks up. Everyone has hurt another person. Intentional or accidental doesn’t much matter. Intent, as you’ll recall, doesn’t absolve you from the communication outcomes.

Apologizing is a skill though it is profane and grotesque to commodify it as such. It *is* possible to give a good apology and it’s possible to do a bad one. Apologies can go better and they can go worse. And thoughtfulness about how to apologize will surely improve your communication outcomes.

When to apologize? Plenty of situations call for apologies. Few of us probably apologize enough, frankly. Easy answer is when you’ve done something wrong or something that hurts someone else, if you’ve made a mistake, or if you’re thoughtless towards another person, or if you’ve engaged in unacceptable behavior. This behavior could be something you did or a behavior you engaged in such as yelling.

Apologies, at their core, are an opportunity to discuss the ground rules of your relationship without doing so explicitly. Apologies are about what is and is not acceptable within the context of your relationship. Apologies are an opportunity to restore dignity and establish integrity through taking responsibility for your behavior.

Apologies take courage. Admitting fault is hard and makes you vulnerable. (This is why lawyers and insurance companies don’t like apologies.) But between people, apologies can expose you to attack or blame which is probably why many people hesitate to apologize when they might need to. Vulnerability is fear-inducing.

Good Apologies

I don’t like thinking about communication activities in “steps” as others might do when it comes to something like an apology. Think of a good apology more in terms of a checklist similar to a shopping list. When you have a shopping list, you don’t have to get everything in order, but if you leave the story with all your grocery items, the trip was successful. Same with apologies. You don’t have to know the order of the words or exactly what to say, but tick these boxes, and your apology is likely to succeed.

There are caution points, however.

Real life apologies are — and IRL communication is — rambling and stumbling and even sometimes awkward. Perfect communication is just an idea in your head, remember?! Communication is never perfect. Any given apology might go well and it might not. You don’t know, and can’t predict, other people’s behavior.

Luckily for many of us, other humans are generally forgiving.

A caution as we go forth: good apologies cannot be faked. Fake apologies will be sniffed out.

Express Remorse. Every apology needs to be — up front and foremost — an apology. You have to say the words “I’m sorry.” or “I apologize.” No qualifications. You should probably say what what you’re sorry for. Not “I’m sorry if you were offended.” Or, “I apologize if that’s what you interpreted.” No “but you did...” or any of it. No qualifications.

“I’m sorry for how I acted.” There are a thousand ways to say it and meet good apology criteria.

You need to be sincere and authentic. Also, timeliness is important. Apologizing sooner rather than later, is generally better. Eventually, is usually fine, but you shouldn’t wait too long if you’re in the wrong.

Take Responsibility. Admit responsibility for your actions or behavior and acknowledge whatever it was that you did. You have to empathize and show you have a clue about how you made them feel.

For example: "I know that I hurt your feelings yesterday when I snapped at you. I'm sure this embarrassed you, especially since everyone else on the team was there. I was wrong to treat you like that."

Context and your relationship will change how you take responsibility, but taking responsibility is a key. “There’s no excuse for how I acted. I shouldn’t talk to you like that.”

Promise It Won't Happen Again. And deliver on that promise. Good apologies will often address what you will do differently in the future or what you’ll do to remedy the situation. Then, you need to follow through. Be specific about what you’ll do different. This is an important way to rebuild trust. And if you don’t have trust, you can’t have much of anything.

Caution: Token gestures, empty gestures, or false promises will do more harm than good. Also, be warned that apologies can lose their potency over time. Repeated apologies for the same thing over and over will eventually fall on deaf ears.

Make Amends. Making amends is taking action — if possible — to make the situation right. “If I can make it up to you, please just ask.” or “Please tell me what you’d like me to do and I’ll do it.”

Apologies are situational and context-dependent, and you always have options to say or do what you want, but a good apologies make amends if the situation allows.

We can learn how to apologize. You can get better at it. How? For example, you can read something like this article. Hopefully you’ve learned something. Next time you have to apologize, you can try a new approach and see if your outcomes improve. You can resolve yourself to be more honest and more contrite. This will almost force a better apology out of you if you stay true to your pledge. You can also be observant and watch someone else apologize. Other people’s behavior can serve as both a model of good behavior as an example of what *not* to do.

Words of Caution

There are things to be cautious about when it comes to apologies and apologizing as you may have noticed me pointing out. But there is more to consider than even just these big things that will doom your apology to fail.

You can apologize too much or too often or for things that aren’t your fault. This can be a problem too. Apologies can come off as innocuous and meaningless, but apologizing can be to your social detriment. There are plenty of times in life when you need to stand up for what you did and not apologize when an apology might be expected.

Bullshit apologies will be sniffed out. Self-serving, defensive attempts at apology can, and likely will, blow up in your face.

While not easy to do well, good apologies are necessary and will help you build better relationships. Nobody like to apologize but it’s something we have to all do. If we have to do it, it’s worth thinking about how to do it better.

Newsletter Updates

So here we are three-quarters of the way through 2020. 39 weeks down, 13 to go. This week’s share is my 3rd quarter update pause.

This 2020 newsletter project, while challenging, has been a resounding success from my perspective. I’ve added quite a few new followers. I’ve gotten to share these demo tape articles and work on my writing process. I’ve pulled back some on the DIY promotion efforts because you know, I have a regular job, I’m a dad, living through a pandemic, et cetera. Despite my quite modest audience and satisfactory open rates, I’m very happy with the feedback I’ve been getting. Doing this 52-week experiment has only solidified my fortitude and developed my confidence in being able to package these ideas in book form.

There are 13 weeks, and thus 13 articles left this year and after that, you should prepare for an extended, indefinite hiatus from this newsletter. Starting January 2021, I’ll be putting the newsletter to sleep for a while to turn my attention fully to book drafting. I will resurrect this newsletter channel at some point with an update or announcement as it may warrant. You can expect to hear from me again, but not for a while.

New year means new attention to my book draft and will encompass the entirety of my writing goal for 2021. It is my aim and hope to have a sellable draft before the end of 2021. An ambitious, but achievable (I hope) goal.

So, you’ll get the 2020 newsletter sign off in 13 weeks. Until then I’m also giving a heads up that I may let things get a little weird around here. Well, weirder than normal that is. I’ve got some writing about useful topics coming too such as apologizing, emotions and communication, and more. But I’ve also saved up a couple of weird ideas over the years that maybe I’ll try out. You can’t help but think about communication as much as I have over the years without having drummed up a few strange ideas. Maybe I’ll share one or two. Stay tuned.

I hope you’re enjoying the articles and getting something out of them. I’ve enjoyed writing them. I’m looking forward to getting them in a form where they can be dispersed more easily aka a book. Books go further than a DIY newsletter.

Maybe if you’ve been paying attention, you can start to see what the book structure might look like? It will be different than what I've shared here, but these seeds of ideas will grow and transform into something I'm really excited about. And I was pretty excited to tackle this newsletter challenge!

As always, I’m open to feedback, commentary, or questions. For any of you that have written, commented, shared, discussed, or asked a question, thanks, it’s helped my process.

What is common ground when it comes to communicating? It seems to me that common ground is as much an act of “seeking” as it is an established thing two people or parties might possess. It also seems to me that common ground is fairly essential to good communication, but that’s debatable — more on that in a bit. Knowing strategies and tactics to build common ground — assuming you want to — are essential.

Common ground is one of those things about communicating that we sort of take for granted. Though we don’t really think about it all that much, it warrants some attention. What is common ground? Better yet, what might it be?

Common ground isn’t necessarily only “agreement” or things we “agree” upon. It’s counterintuitive like that. This sounds strange, I realize. Common ground, or not-common ground, isn’t something that’s only important when we’re in certain contexts either. Common ground isn’t only important, for example, when we’re negotiating or solving problems. It’s also a trap, I believe, to see common ground only as something of an “established basic truth” of common facts and the like. Common ground is more than that. Common ground is more than that. It’s ongoing, ever-evolving, and always changing. It’s something we’re always seeking and doing as we communicate.

Common ground looks more like points of connection, things to talk about, stories we tell, experiences to identify or sympathize with, or things to do together. In other words, meaning-experiences where personal significance is drawn. Good communication doesn’t have to be about much of anything of substance at all. Common ground can be many things and goes far deeper than most people give credit for.

What Are We Talking About When We Say “Common Ground”?

A quick etymological detour — our word “communication” derives from the Latin communiactionem, “a making common, imparting, communicating” which itself is a noun of action from the part-participle stem communicare (pronounced kuh-MEW-nih-KAH-ray) which means “to share; divide out; inform, impart; to join, unite or participate in,” literally “to make common.” Related is the word communis “common, public, general.”

There is a close relationship between the ideas of communicating and literally making things common, it’s how ideas spread. But deeper questions persist, so let’s get beyond the dictionary.

What does common ground look like? A legit question, as absurd as it sounds and trickier than one might think. Is “common ground” only what we agree on? No, as I said above. Is it similar or shared experiences? Does it assume we have nothing in common at the outset and common ground must be created? What assumptions underpin your idea of common ground?

I’m unconvinced that we could even collectively agree on what exactly common ground is, as basic as it might sound. Sort of ironic, don’t you think?

Common ground — whatever it is — isn’t even always good. Sometimes, common ground is just, well, things that we have in common. That doesn’t make them good. Family, for example, can be something that we have “in common” with some subset of other people but that sure doesn’t make it good. Many people are quite indifferent or even actively dislike their family or certain members of it. Common ground isn’t necissarily what you think and it’s not always a good thing.

This makes things both more complex and simplifies them, strangely enough. While we can seek common ground that is mutually good, we don’t have enslave ourselves to things we have in common with people we might not like.

Despite my reservations, I think common ground is an essentially good basis for communicating well — that is, a good goal to have — and that there’s nearly always room to establish common ground with another person.

Strangers V. Priors

Finding common ground with strangers — people you don’t know — is one thing. Finding common ground with people you already have a relationship with is another. With people you know, common ground can be easy and already established or it can feel like an insurmountable challenges. Plus, the consequences and parameters are much different. It can be difficult to push relationships to deeper levels. Strangers are easier, so let’s start with them.

When it comes to new people and new relationships, common ground can be straightforward and basic: What do they like? What are their interests? What do they care about? In short, what could the two of you talk about? Maybe you’re a fan of the same sports team or enjoy similar music. Maybe you grew up near one another or know some of the same people. There’s always a potential starting point and there’s no point in listing things off. Literally anything can be a basic footing of common ground when you barely know someone.

Heck, sometimes all you have in common is that you’re both co-occupying some weird space together and trying process what’s going on. For example, I once felt strangely close to this stranger from the train after we talked on the Damen Avenue I-290 overpass in Chicago after fleeing a train due to a man with a gun on the platform. We talked on the bridge and for the rest of the train ride home after the all clear was given. That’s all we had or ever will have in common. Common ground can be quick and intense. I wonder if she remembers me as I remember her.

Certainly, there are billions of other types of encounters where strangers forge common ground in much less intense and fearful circumstances. When you’re not concerned with imminent violence, it’s much easier to find nicer things to talk about and bond over. Asking questions would be my strategy recommendation. Express an interest in someone and they’re likely to reciprocate.

Interestingly, common ground with people you know well can be more of a challenge. There’s more history — more previous interactions which all went their own way.

With people you know, things are often more personal. There are rawer emotions, personal identity, and even politics of all sorts that can be exposed or at the heart of matters. Certain things may, or may not, be open for conversation.

This isn’t to say these things aren’t a consideration with strangers, but with those we’re close to, well, things are different.

After many interactions over time, we often come to know what to expect. Relationships form patterns and repeat over time; patterns of doing things and repetitions of behavior make it challenging to forge new territory. Certain interactions tend to go the same. Think again how things often go with family as an example. Patterns repeat. It can be hard to find common ground with people you know. Hopefully you have it and it’s easy, but this is not always the case. Some conversations don’t change.

Every once in a while something major can jolt any relationship in a new direction where it becomes possible for new common ground to be established.

4 Tips For Common Ground

Despite my predisposition against easy lists of communication tips and tricks, here are 4 things you can do to make common common ground.

1. Be curious. Ask more questions and assert your opinion less. Questions are the expression of curiosity.

2. Have goodwill. Common ground starts with interest in, and care for, the other person.

3. Listen. Listen more intently to find places to latch on and build bridges and connections.

4. Look for common or shared interests. The tiniest scrap of kindling can start a big fire.

Could I add more here? Sure, probably. But this is plenty to get you started.

Common Ground Oddities

Down this common ground rabbit hole, deeper and more confusing that most people realize, there are true some oddities about how humans communicate. Communication can be weird.

Common ground does not necessitate “agreement.” You can have some thing in common AND have differing opinions about that thing. For example, if there is someone that you’re in constant conflict at work for example, you probably don’t think you have much in common with them, but what you actually have as your “common ground” is the rocky relationship and whatever terrain you’re fighting over. Makes for confounding solutions to problems.

Commonality can come from non-commonality. Healthy disagreements can, and do, form bonds. Emphasis on healthy. Going through the fire with someone can forge strong relationships just as the right fire makes strong metal. Healthy disagreement can result in stronger bonds.

Common ground involves trying to see something from another person’s point of view which is far harder and less frequently achieved than we think. People tend to only see things from our own point of view — we’re selfish like that. But to forge something meaningful in common, you have to try to see the world how the person might see it. This is not not easy. You could even say it’s impossible, but if you want real common ground, you have to try. It’s particularly essential if connections are sought over difficult topics.

Forgiveness. If someone in a relationship needs or requires forgiveness or needs to atone for something…and that can’t be achieved, then there is little chance of common ground, I’m afraid to say. If forgiveness or atonement is required and someone won’t apologize, you’re better off cutting your losses and moving on if you can.

Last, realize that not everyone wants common ground and common ground in and of itself isn’t necessarily a desirable goal. For example, I desire no common ground with Nazis other than I would probably enjoy punching one in the face.

For example, I desire no common ground with Nazis other than I would probably enjoy punching one in the face.

Sometimes people don’t want common ground. Sometimes they want to win. And winning without common ground can be just fine too.

Common ground is more than you think and can be a strange path to get there. Weird, eh? Common ground, whatever it is, is certainly central to communicating well though our path to it may be rough and bumpy. And common ground, while often a good thing, isn’t necessarily. It’s probably worth working on and trying for, but certainly isn’t all you need for communication success.

Every communication interaction has many layers of richness and depth. When it comes to meaning, there’s essentially always more of it.

It never stops.

If you look for meaning, you’ll find it. No instance of communication has just one meaning, there’s always many meanings. And meanings on top of meanings. There’s nearly always a depth and a richness to communicating — at least the good communication — that’s infinite.

Untouchable, ephemeral.

Meaning may come out of nowhere, but it certainly doesn’t end up just anywhere, it gets layered on top of the meaning that came before it — in the context of that relationship and from broader culture. Like a river carves out a canyon, communication carves out the flow and path of your relationships.

Remember how it’s a simple given that communication always has multiple interpretations? Here, I’m talking about depth. I’m talking about how whenever new meaning is created and it gets lacquered right on top of the meaning that came before it. I’m talking about exploration beyond the superficial.

Palimpsests, anyone?

A palimpsest is a page from a scroll or a book — parchment, an object — made of lamb or calf skin. The expensive and scarce treated skin, also called pergamene, was used for writing and could be scraped or washed off and re-used.

Through modern technology, we are able to see past the top layer to see what’s underneath. In these photos, you can see the actual physical object on the left looking much like you might imagine. On the right, you can see the hidden layers, information, meaning, and recordings from previous texts buried deep in the chemicals and stains.

So it is with ink and animal skin, so it is with human interaction. There’s always more meaning down there somewhere though you may not realize it.

Palimpsests serve as an example of how communicating goes between people. Every conversation you have as a new layer directly laid on top of the old ones. This happens within relationships but we do often glean lessons from one relationship and apply them to others. In our lacquering of these new meanings on top of old, we watch new meaning grow and old meaning get covered up or even sometimes just melted away.

The depths of the richness of our communication are at some extent, incomprehensible and potentially awe-inducing. And just as how pergamene transforms into a palimpsest, it’s how our relationships become what they are. The sheer amount of interactions, and conversations that compound over the course of a day or week or year (forget about a lifetime!) to make up our innumerable relationships is enough to overwhelm. The different meanings upon meanings that make up the depths and layers of the meaning we create is a lot to take in.

Technology Depth | Depth Technology

While we’re exploring communication’s depth and richness, I once again feel compelled to come back to technology as it enables richness to play out directly in front of us through channels and forms of media.

To this point in human history, any technology we’ve created insofar as we use it to communicate is only able to accurately replicate or enhance very small fragments of the [human] communicative whole. Technology enhances communication in certain ways, with both good and bad consequences. And while technology-enhanced communication does not have a 1:1 correspondence with F2F communicating, technology does make it easier to see and access the depth that’s there in certain ways. You can scroll through old text messages and emails. You can listen to voicemails over and over to hear a tone of voice or to catch an exact phrasing. You could analyze, if you wanted to, the corpus of someone’s social media content. Not that many people do these things mind you, I’m just saying it’s possible.

Much of the depth of meaning exists only in our heads (and out in between us), technology just makes it easier for us to see or create richer interactions. These trends will grow in the future. Take augmented reality (AR) for example which is “embodied” quite uniquely and datafied in all sorts of crazy ways. Richer interactions with technology will continue to become possible.

There are consequences to all of this by the way. Black Mirror did an episode on it called The Entire History of You where the ability to play back old conversations did not have such rosy outcomes.

Another way to slice into this technology pie is to think about a more current and less sci-fi technology: social media. The term itself is a bit of a problem a Facebook, Twitter, Insta, or TikTok profile is no more or less ‘social’ than any other media. All media is social.

Plenty of good relationships have formed through social media, but what appears on or is shared via someone’s ‘social media’ is only a small fragment of that person’s total identity or being. For some relationships, the depth is formed through the interactions made possible through social media - friendships, reconnections, collaborations. To others, little depth is there and we only serve as bystander witnesses to conversations that aren’t worth the powder to blow them to hell.

Though I’m no one to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t say or have conversations about, social media is often chocked full of poison experiences. It’s great for some things and downright deadly and damaging for others. Remember that social media is always a fragment. People are more than what they appear on screen (Sometimes even much more!) but recall the words of Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Augmented reality, social media, someday robots. Science fiction has already taught us nearly all we need to know to imagine what human-like robots might look like. Bots are everywhere on the internet these days, someday they’ll just be everywhere. What will our interactions look like then? That remains to be seen.

We’re all just out here walking around uttering things out into the world. Sometimes they land and sometimes not. When the things we say and the ways we interact connect with others in meaningful ways, those messages ring and resonate like bells. Waves of meaning intersect and overlap with one another as they criss-cross — forming meaning in all directions — layers we feel but cannot see. Every conversation resonates to some degree. If you look close, you can see how deep things sometimes go.

Communication is a process. This process, at any given point in time, has one interaction point populated by two (or more) people. I’m talking at a microscopically individual level, but when you consider everyone, at larger scales, communication is everywhere. We’re all communicating nearly all the time.

Any interaction with another person is communication — call these “conversations” if you like — and any given conversation (aka communication) has multiple perspectives on it. Both you and the other person, engaged in the same process or same interaction, has your own perspective, your own interpretations, takeaways, inferences, and outcomes. Each person also has their own approach and demeanor, mannerisms, and so on . These combinations make every instance of communication highly individual and unique.

The experience of communication is a relatively common process I imagine, but just because we all communicate — just because we have the process in common — doesn’t mean communication is always the the same, even for two people involved in the same conversation.

The Messiness of Polysemy

Communication always has multiple interpretations and multiple meanings. The fancy word for this is polysemy. Pronounced “PUH-lih-seh-mee” or, if you’re a fan of the more formal IPA notation: /päˈlisəmē/. Polysemy is the capacity for a word or phrase to have multiple meanings.

This feature goes beyond just individual words or short phrases though. We can think of interactions as having multiple meanings, takeaways, inferences, and so on. Remember, your perspective and that of the person you’re communicating with is never the same. Where we meet and intertwine is common between us, but meaning is created at this point and resides elsewhere.

Communication’s multiple interpretations is a given — just part of the wild and messy process of interacting with other people. It’s not direct or linear. This is why it’s better to ask: “How much does meaning overlap with understanding?” rather than how much information got across. It’s possible to grasp where one person’s understanding and another’s converge and assess where they might differ though even when considering multiple meanings.

People walk away from the same interaction with different takeaways, different feelings — some things in common and some things not. Two people can completely disagree, have little to no “overlap”, yet still communication has occurred. Communicating isn’t about agreement or getting along or cohesion except in an ideal sense.

You Just Don’t Know

It’s a funny thing about communicating to never quite know what the outcomes will be. And it’s odd that we interact and communicate all the time often with little to no thought about what the outcomes will be beyond, “Sure, I wouldn’t mind talking with them for a little while.”

We communicate all the time without knowing what the outcomes will be. We don’t know where communicating will go. Well, sometimes conversations go exactly as you expect them to, but the possibility for variety is always there.

The thing is, you can be perfectly happy and content from communication where you have no plan going in. You can communicate well by just being contented to sit around having a conversation. You don’t have to know exactly what to do or how to get there to still have things be alright. This is why erring towards sharing is a good strategy. Say what you want, try to be nice about, have it come from a good place. You can call this “intent” if you like but, intent never trumps outcomes. Try to listen more and communicate with hope. This is about the best we can do when communicating and yet still we can’t predict what will happen.

Communication’s Unplannedness

As I wrap up this walk through some of the messier aspects of communicating, I need to acknowledge randomness. When we encounter others (physically, but also communicatively), sometimes things are planned out and at others they are quite random. So, for example, you could go into a meeting with an agenda but also with an expectation of how things will generally go. You can also randomly find yourself in the middle of a conversation that came out of nowhere and feels like it’s flailing wildly. Both instances are communication and and we never quite know what we’ll get.

The randomness of communication is partially why and how communication slips into the background even though it’s right out in front of us. Imagine if every time you struck up a conversation with someone you had to announce “Ok, let’s communicate now.” You’d look and sound crazy. But every time you have a conversation, this is exactly what you’re doing. We don’t announce our intention to communicate though, we just get right into it.

How often do you happen to find yourself conversing with someone? Maybe often or maybe not, but we don’t only communicate when we have a plan just as we don’t always have a plan when we communicate. Conversation is conversation and just because it isn’t planned or formal doesn’t make it less (or more) meaningful. We communicate by happenstance: we run into people on the street, we strike up random conversations with neighbors, we might even connect with an old friend or talk with someone new who piques our interest. You can’t always plan for it. You don’t have to.

Communication interactions always have multiple outcomes. There are always multiple meanings. It’s a given considering the actual messy nature of communicating — all part of the process.

I believe in the possibility of communication.

But communication can’t solve all of your problems.

You don’t have to look far online find someone saying “communication is key” or “you need to communicate” or some other trite advice to fix the problems ailing you. This sort of meaninglessness is everywhere. You’ll hear it about dating better/being a better relationship partner, why you broke up, why your marriage is or isn’t working, about expressing your sexual preferences, the pathway to general relationship happiness, how you succeed in your career, and more.

This makes communication seem like some sort of cure all. But is it?

No, not really.

Accepting the premise that we can’t not communicate, the realization that “communication is key” doesn’t solve our problem because communication can be shitty too. Sometimes, [bad] communication is exactly the problem. We can’t just call it communication when things go great. Bad communication is communication too.

Communication isn’t key. Communicating well is key. “How do we do that?” is what you should be asking yourself.

Communication can’t solve all your problems, but it is your best hope.

Better Communication, Not More

Focus on better communication, not more of it. Quality over quantity.

Another email, another text, another conversation may be exactly what you don’t need when the prior ones haven’t worked. Sometimes, it’s the volume of communication (in that there is too much) that’s the issue. Lack of communication can also be a problem, but people feel overwhelmed by messages and information these days. How many unread emails do you have? Or how many text messages or notifications on your phone have you ignored? How many times would you just rather not have that conversation, but instead sit back in peace and quiet? It’s better to focus on the quality of the interaction as the goal. Better communication, not just more of it.

Don’t spend time on bad communication if you don’t have to. It’s a waste. Walk away, if possible, or do something to make it better. If you see a communication problem, try to point it out if you can. But pointing out communication problems is really hard, a lot harder than it sounds.

Another approach to improving communication quality is to be proactive: say that nice thing that’s in the back of your mind, tell someone that you appreciate them, or ask that question you’ve been wondering about. Do something to make it better. We all have the power to start making communication better at any given moment and there are plenty of ways to do so.

When it comes to better quality communication, it’s worth mentioning distractions, especially technology. Technology can enable good communication, it can also be a hindrance to it. It’s easy to sit there and scroll through your app of choice instead of engaging with the person across from you. Even normally, our attention is pulled in many different directions at once. This is a challenge. Technology amplifies that and it can result in communicating being worse than it might otherwise be. It’s not that technology is bad and you shouldn’t look at your phone when having a conversation with others, but rather, to be better aware of when your technology, or someone else’s, is dragging down your conversation.

Beyond Communication

Though certainly its centrality to relationship formation and maintenance is undeniable, communication certainly isn’t the only factor in a relationship. Many things go beyond communication: physical realities (maybe you’re physically together or apart), biology (people’s dispositions, stature, mannerisms), random chance (the randomness of interactions and language, for example), as well as — depending on the type of relationship — things like financial realities, identity matters (class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on), not to mention relationship history and context. We communicate about many of these things, they impact and shape our relationships, but they are beyond communication.

Interactions don’t just come from nowhere. Even prior to its initial bubbling, a conversation has already been influenced — but not determined — by any number of factors. These external forces can and do exert pressure on relationships and sometimes, no matter the amount of talking or listening, more communication won’t solve the problems, discrepancies, or disrespect might exist in that relationship.

No Magic Cure All

Back in the old days, say 100 years ago, there was this idea of communication as a “magic bullet.” This idea pervaded for many decades and even persists today. The concept behind this idea of communication being that whatever you said, whatever the message was, went straight into the source or receiver as if to be a magic bullet.

Of course, this isn’t how communication works.

The idea that communication can fix all your problems — or that simply “more communication” is all you need is rooted in this way of thinking about communication. The mere fact of communicating isn’t a magic cure all.

We think to ourselves, “Well I talked to them!” or we assume they got the message. But different interpretations and different meanings is baked right in to the process of communicating. It’s not only communication when it’s a success. You’re communicating when things aren’t going well also. That’s entirely the point — how to make it better is the question.

Communication isn’t electricity. You don’t flip a switch and it turns on. You have to work at it. It’s a process. Making it better is how to increase your chances at success and there are many ways to communicate better. We don’t always reach our desired goals or even acceptable outcomes. That’s just how it is.

Trying to communicate better is all we’ve got. It’s not a magic fix, but it is your best hope.

Among other things (information, meaning), communication is about change — movement from state to state. Old form to new. Change is always happening but we don’t often feel it due to incrementality. It happens just a little bit at a time. Change also quite often feels like stasis, which is quite sneaky.

The fact that you communicate at all — that you talk and interact with other humans — is all the evidence we need that change is always happening. Every time you converse or interact with someone, both of you leave the interaction different even if only-so-slightly.

Change happens through communication.

It’s a hard lesson, I suppose, that change is the only constant. Buddhist monks seem to get this. Darwin got it. (Astro)physicists seem to get it what with their talk of the always expanding universe and and vibrating electron strings and all that.

Change goes beyond communication but communication is central to it, at least when it comes to people. Our words and behaviors (and those of others) form into structures, patterns of doing things, and influence individual behavior. There are planned, formal changes and informal changes. Corporate reorganizations and the more buddhist ideas of change as being everywhere around us all the time. Communication is how change happens. Let’s explore some of the connections between change and communication.

Change and Relationships

Think about any relationship you have. That relationship is different now than when it started. This is because you’ve communicated with the other person. Over and over and over. Or maybe just a few times…it doesn’t matter. Every relationship changes over time. This is because we communicate and interact.

To make sense of our relationships, it’s tempting to think of them as stable and maybe you could sometimes say certain relationships are more stable than others. But the reality is that in most relationships, even if they feel stable, stability is an easily disrupted status. It doesn’t take much for a relationship to change and evolve.

Every individual person changes from second-to-second every day (Scary to think about, right?). And if that’s true for you, it’s true for others. If both people are changing, then how can the interaction between them not be changing? Reliability and predictability are not the same as stability and stasis. Every time we communicate with someone, every time we converse, every time any information is exchanged and meaning is formed — we are changed, even if just a tiny little bit.

Every communication is action. With all actions, something changes. Relationships are always unfinished.

Punctuated & Gradual

Change can come in punctuated forms: a divorce, a downsize, a death. These moments *feel* like change — when you know that going forward, nothing will quite be the same. Communication facilitates these punctuated moments. Maybe, as with a divorce or breakup, it often does so in a rush or flurry of intensity. With a downsize, maybe there are rumors and then you’re called into an office and let go. With death, interestingly, it’s the *lack* of possibility of communication that intensifies our reaction. These are just a few examples of punctuated change, there are many others. But the punctuated nature of some changes must not blind us to the fact that change is more often incremental.

Gradual change is the elusive one. It happens without us noticing. Yet, these small changes are stimulated or facilitated by communication just as punctuated, formal changes are. Communication doesn’t stimulate change only when we notice it. It happens in each conversation, a little bit at a time, shifting and molding your relationship just a tiny little bit. After each interaction, your relationship absorbs that most recent exchange to take on a very slightly different form. We exit and enter every communication interaction slightly different though we may not perceive any change to ourselves at all.

Change Is Constant, But It Isn’t Permanent; The Outcomes of Change

We think of change as a new state. Something was, then it changed, now it is. Your relationship used to be one way, then X happened, then things were different. But change is a constant presence. Any given change isn’t permanent, just the current status. And change often happens on a very small and gradual scale. It’s not just the big disruptive fissures that signify a new State B after State A. Change can be slow and might not feel much like what we think change feels like at all.

Change can be lots of things: new behaviors, a new way of relating to one another, something you feel about the other person, or some new information that primes people to act in some way. Change can be big or small, but it happens through communication.

Communication hides in plain sight. Right there in front of you.

Many behaviors we perform throughout our day can be thought of as communication. Talk to a store clerk? That’s communication. Exchange some texts with a friend or sibling? You’re communicating. A work meeting to talk about project expectations? A conversation about plans for the weekend? Communication. Trading messages with someone you matched with? That’s communication too.

All of our typical everyday interactions, even the ones we don’t give much thought to, are communication.

It’s everywhere, I’m telling you!

Funny how it hides right there in plain sight.

Communication fading easily into the background is one of its tricks. There are certain forms or instances of communication where we are highly aware of the fact that we’re communicating. We take notice. Think of what it feels like to compose an emotional letter or what it feels like to have a difficult conversation like a break-up. Those feel like communication. But there are just as many instances, if not more, when we’re communicating but don’t notice it as much.

Communication Always Looks Different

So, we’re always communicating. We can’t help ourselves. Yet, many communication situations look quite different from one another. Having a weekly conversation with your boss is communication but it doesn’t look anything like hanging out with some neighbor friends in a backyard watching a ballgame. But that’s also communication.

A few elements are at play, but a specific note here is how communication is always tied to performing roles. In every different context, people perform different roles or partial elements of themselves. The roles we perform depend on the situation, who it is we’re communicating with, and expectations.

Situations have different characteristics, such as more or less structure. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings start with set questions and a procedure for how those questions are asked and answered. Did you know that? Lots of structure, with definite purposes, formal, yet open communication. Most relationships don’t have this sort of planned out structure. And that’s fine too.

The topics we communicate about vary widely as well. This is natural. What is common to talk about in one relationship is unheard of in an other. You’re not likely to talk to your spouse about that PowerPoint you’re working on for a client and you’re not likely to talk to your Atlanta based co-worker about where to eat in Chicago. In each relationship, there are certain topics and subjects that are more or less likely to come up or are up for grabs. This always-shifting nature of communication can allow the obvious fact we are communicating to fade gently into the background, away from our attention.

In addition to different topics, we’re always striving for different outcomes in our assorted relationships. In some relationships, you and the other person solve problems (Together, hopefully!), in others you commiserate and comfort each other, in others still, you might argue and be in conflict…which leads to other places and outcomes. All of these are communication even though they themselves are quite different sets of behaviors and outcomes themselves.

So, what is communication? Lots of things, which is why it can be hard to grasp and pin down. It hums along in the background without us often noticing it much.

How We Talk About Communicating (Without Realizing It)

We communicate all the time. Every interaction, every conversation, is communication. Blah blah blah.

Also interesting though, is how we talk about communication. Communication is sneaky. We have sort of a meta-language about communication that deeply infiltrates our normal, everyday ways of talking. We have language about communication that we use without often realizing what it is we’re takling about, that we use to describe our connections with others.

We connect. We chat. We chew the fat. We shoot the shit.

We text and call and write and ping.

We explain ourselves, outline points, and express our views.

We talk and we listen.

We have meetings, run ideas up the flagpole, and have water cooler conversations.

We reach out and network.

We hang out, we chill, and we let the cat out of the bag.

They flap their lips, have the gift of gab, and if I bump into you on the street we might shoot the breeze.

These, and many others, are examples of colloquialisms that describe communicating. We talk about communication all the time without explicitly saying or thinking that we’re talking about communicating. And this is only a sampling of this meta-language.

Automatonic Human Behavior; A Final Factor

A final confounding, contributing factor to this hidden-in-plain-sight nature of communication is the fact that a lot of human communication behavior can be automatonic.

automaton (n.)

1 : a relatively self-operating mechanism as in a robot

2 : designed to follow an automatically predetermined sequence of operations or respond to encoded instructions

3 : an individual who acts in a mechanical fashion

There’s no shortage of situations where humans seem to be on autopilot.

What kinds of behaviors? Lots of them! Conversations with store clerks, swaths of social media behavior (hitting the like button, sharing some nonsense with little to no thought or critical assessment), and passerby conversations (Hi. Hi. How are you? Good, you? Good, thanks. K bye.) There’s always the possibility for genuine and meaningful interaction, but in some conversations we’re more likely to be on autopilot (more or less) than others.

This can lead to problems: stagnation, lack of meaning, lack of enjoyment, and more. It’s also how pathogen spreads.

Mindless sharing on social media is not the only example, but it is a prime one. It’s with the tiniest movements of your finger that people are able to share, endorse, pontificate, or urge. It’s beyond easy to say — through your behavior — “I agree” or “THIS IS WHAT I THINK!” or “This is important!!!??!!” when it might be important or you might just be an idiot. The wild and strange things people share that endorse and support and justify their obtuse, damaging political views are one very prominent example. It doesn’t give much hope that some humans can change their behavior, does it? I’d also note that in terms of design, social media is a tool that works exactly as planned to exploit our behavioral and neurological weaknesses and instigate problematic automatonic behavior. Tristian Harris’ work on “brain hacking” is worth checking out if you’re interested in more on this point.

This is a dark side of sharing. The mindless sharing of corrupted information is how pathogen spreads. We share and dissent and argue and behave in attention-seeking ways and other things which feed their own further loops of communication. It’s easy to go on autopilot.

The point here isn’t: social media bad. The point is: automatonic communication behavior is everywhere and it has consequences. Patterns of communicating and ways of interacting get ingrained, sometimes quickly. At that point, they are even harder to change. This is a lesson that goes well-beyond social media. Routine can be good, but it can be deadly to relationships as well.

We communicate all the time. Every conversation is communication. Every share, every tweet, every call, every meeting, every interaction. It’s all communication, hidden right there in front of you. Communication changes and twists from one context to the next, but communication always remains the force that shapes your relationships, right there in front of our noses…out in between us, and other. Hidden, in plain sight.