It started with a kiss

As part of my PhD education, I attended a training session on communicating research. During this session, the trainer quoted a well-known saying; that verbal communication is less than 10% of the entire communication process (the precise figure was 7%). The rest is “everything else”; body language...cadence…pitch.

Communication is only 7% verbal/words

Kids get this. Most toddlers don’t have a huge vocabulary but are able to understand easily the message that is being conveyed to them. In my house it is usually me stood with a hand on my hip, the other pointing at a shoe, eyebrows raised, high pitch. My kid gets it. They use the 93% available to them to figure it out. Toddlers: masters in communication.

Whilst the accuracy of this 7% quote is up for debate, it still gets me thinking about communication via messages only. Particular in the world of Instagram, twitter, facebook, whatsapp…where a status/tweet/caption becomes scrutinised by all. It is part and parcel of participating in this online platform - you will receive both positive and negative comments.

You have probably seen this example sentence before:

“She didn’t say he stole the money”

Here, stressing one word each time, can completely change the meaning of the sentence. And it really highlights what my issue with a 1 dimensional message is. No one really knows what the person writing the message means.

Communication is never just you saying something, but equally and probably more importantly, how it is interpreted the other end.

So when you remove the 90% of the communication, what happens? Well, my guess is that we hit the murky area of implied communication: which becomes particularly tricky when the subject is so emotive, like parenting.

For example, I get particularly stressed out with twitter. I dread sending out a tweet to a pool of intelligent twitter users who all know my area of research (much better than I do). When I do tweet (which is rare because I suffer with a case of Chronic Retweeting Syndrome [CRS]) I panic about the replies or reactions that I get. I read each tweet and try to determine if the tweeter is being nice or mean. And I think because of my personality, I assume they can all see me for the fraud I am and that all responses are laced with some sort of sarcasm.

I have been mulling over this idea since the whole thread between mumsnet & instamums occurred. I started to read the infamous thread (I didn’t finish reading it as it was just too long – another downfall of only being able to communicate with text is the length of it) and the main issue to me seemed to be in the interpretation of people’s messages. Having read some of the content, there didn’t, for the most part, seem to be much out of the ordinary in terms of opinion. It doesn’t seem to be the case that people can have a conversation about parenting via a forum. There is far too much emotion and miscommunication. People read your message and add their own meaning to it. Surely, it isn’t just about the words, but about the meaning each contributor is trying to make.   

This goes beyond parenting forums. For example, imagine you text your friend:

“Hello hello! How are you? xxx”

And you get a message like this back:

“Fine. You?”

What would you think? That the person is being short and shouting the response? That they could be in a mood/upset with you? Do you replay all of the recent conversations you have had with and about that friend? Do you know that the person is at work and so might not have time to follow the social norms of text messaging?

Then there are the things that people do in text messages that you wouldn’t do face to face. “xxx” being an example. I don’t do kisses. I wouldn’t air blow a kiss if we were face to face so I don’t see the need for this in a message. But suddenly, there are all of these new texting social rules. That if you don’t use them (kisses), you might be perceived as being cold. If you were to see the messages between myself and the man, you would assume we have a mild level of hatred and tolerance for each other, with the odd photo of each other looking gormless thrown in. Having said that, I now do send my mum “xxx” else she immediately thinks I am upset with her and calls me asking what’s wrong. This whole “text rules” is a new discovery for me and it now makes me question every message I send! To kiss or not to kiss, that is the question.  

So what am I trying to get at in this? I suppose there are two groups of communicators at any one moment (and you can change between the two) – the writers and the readers. 

Perhaps both groups should be more aware of their own role in the communication process and that their perceived message might not be the received message.

Perhaps, if we wish to discuss something emotive like parenting, we need to move to a media form where we can assess the other elements of communication other than the written word. Perhaps this is why people tend to like vlogging or instastories/snapchat/live streaming.

The irony of writing and trying to get my point across in exactly the restricted media I am talking about, is not lost on me. Perhaps, if this is the case and we need to start filming everything to get our message across, I should just go and live on the moon. Because I can’t film myself for shit.

 Mum, PhD.