Digital human communication is f** broken
Humans are social creatures that constantly interact with one another by expressing and recognizing intent, where actions trigger reactions.
Communication (kuh-myoo-ni-kay-shun), n
The process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, and behavior.
Research repeatedly proves that only a small portion of all human communication is textual, while a big chunk is vocal, and more than half is visual. Words themselves are not the most critical part of communication. Hence the old axiom a picture is worth a thousand words, so too, a video is worth at least ten meetings.
The current state of digital human communication is really broken, or not even close to its full potential, but I’m still hopeful and excited to see new digital tools and new mediums emerge. Apple and Meta are investing time and money in AR and VR, while a lot of startups such as YAC, are born and maybe die in the process.
I can’t wait to see a world where humans can use more native natural expressions to communicate digitally with clarity, speed, and less effort.
The future of digital communication is more vocal, more visual, and less textual.
In the real physical world with no software involved, two people can use gestures, body language, facial expressions, touch, voice, etc, and each of these mechanisms can vary in a spectrum. For instance, a word can be voiced quietly to convey peace, tranquility, safety, or it can be voiced as a scream, conveying fear, desperation, or even anger. Facial expressions can vary from a smile to express happiness, or a wink to express sexual intent, or even cry to express pain or struggle.
But in the digital world, especially in the enterprise tech world, in order to communicate with others, people end up substituting these native human expressions by digital artifacts (e.g. emojis, stickers, post-its), or with text (e.g. pin+text on a design file in Figma, long recall docs or pin+text on Frame.io for video editors on specific frames). Poor designers, poor video editors! Most of the time they receive feedback on their work via text, and a lot of it.
Creating these feedback artifacts takes time and effort. Feedback givers have to translate their thoughts and intentions into text (encoding). Feedback receivers on the other hand have to parse and spend extra brain power to make sense of this intention artifact (decoding). And there is no guarantee that they will get it right, leading to more feedback artifacts in digital form to generate more clarity.
It’s like the old telephone game. Why is it so fun to watch?
Because the message will always lose fidelity as it goes from one person to another.
Human beings need text to store and iterate on knowledge to evolve our species, but it’s a skill that needs to be learned, and developed. It takes effort. And thanks to neuroplasticity, our brains can learn over the years, with practice, how to express and recognize intention through words.
Some people might say that text is critical because it helps them organize their thoughts, create structure and therefore they communicate better. And in the new era of AI, we all agree that text is key. Words become tokens that become digits that can be processed like never before, creating artificial intelligence.
But creating text requires more effort than using the native old human expressions we mentioned earlier.
After more than 20 years in tech working for digital agencies on Flash and Web work, and also in big tech (BlackBerry, PayPal, Adobe and Intuit), I’ve seen very little progress on how creatives receive feedback on designs, videos, apps or websites they’re working on. The feedback remains similar to what we had 20 years ago: mostly text.
The state of the art of digital communication in the enterprise (September, 2023)
- Email (textual)
- Threads (textual)
- Pins and text in a web link (textual)
- Screen recording in a web link or local file
- Voice messages
- Text messages (textual)
- Long documents in the cloud or local file (textual)
- "Zoom" meetings
Mostly text, text that requires unnatural non-native effort to parse.
It takes time and effort to encode thoughts into text, losing a ton of fidelity in the process. And it takes even more time and effort to decode text, resulting in threads or follow up meetings to clarify the information.
There are extra layers of information beyond text, critical for effective human communication, that are missed when these feedback pieces are shared in a disconnected form.
Can’t wait to see a world where humans can use more native natural expressions to communicate digitally with clarity, speed, and less effort.
