Does Social Media Make You Anti-Social?

Well . . . No.  And yes.  The issue surfaces regularly
in management situations.  It sounds like this:  “This guy is great with
social media, software and applications.  He knows how to work online
with other people.  He understands social networking.  But get him or
her in front of people and it’s a disaster.  So I can’t promote him. 
Get him out of the cubicle and he’s lost.  He doesn’t know how to read
people.”

In what seems to be a rejection of the above, Penelope Trunk makes
the point that Gen-Yers are better communicators than the rest of the
generations.   She supports her idea with research from Stanford writing
classes.  The research finds that texting and tweeting makes them
better communicators.  It teaches them rhetorical adaptability, the
ability to make adjust to their “reading” audience.  All well and good. 
And obviously true.  I’d have to be brain dead not to realize that
Gen-Yers are better at electronic communication and that the near
instant feedback teaches them quickly adjust their messages.  But
Penelope pushes the envelope too far in arguing that they’re better at
face-to-face communication than their elders.  Better?  I doubt it. 
Equal to?  On some occasions, perhaps. 

But a very important issue that both Penelope and the research
on writing skills omit is the high impact of the nonverbal.  The
research is about written rhetoric, not about oral rhetoric.  In
distinct contrast, research on oral communication indicates that more
than 90% of face-to-face communication is nonverbal.  That includes the
impact of context, verbal tone, posture, gesture and eye contact.  And
it’s all those nonverbal messages that take a lot of time to learn.  You
can text from now to doomsday and you won’t learn, for example, what
silence in a given conversation means.  I’ve watched people lose their
jobs as a result of the simple failure to understand silence in a given
context.  And when you ask, you’re asking for trouble, unless you know
how to ask in a way that doesn’t evoke defensiveness.  And to be blunt,
it’s hard enough to learn what the real questions are in your thirties
and forties, much less in your twenties.  It’s even more difficult to
learn how to ask those questions effectively in a face-to-face situation
when a lot is riding on the answers.     

I’m not a Luddite.  I think texting and tweeting are great.  I do it
myself.  Gen-Yers are inherently superior at it than the other
generations.  Keep it up!  But don’t get fooled.  On its own, it’s
horribly inadquate.  If you want to succeed in today’s world, you’re
going to need world-class expertise in a new rhetorical technology:
SMART TALK.  Effective talk that’s face-to-face and can manage both the
verbal AND the nonverbal.  The demands of new contexts put people in
situations they wouldn’t have dreamed of just 15 years ago.  As a
result, I spend days and weeks teaching Gen-Yers, Gen-Xers and even
Boomers how to manage face-to-face in today’s complex, complicated and
volatile world.

Does social media make you anti-social?  NOPE.  It’s just plainly inadequate for the demands of the 21st century.

Link to original post

Leave a Reply