Communication Is Dead

A Valentine’s Day puff piece

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I thought it would be fitting to write about communication. Communication is an important facet of life; it makes up a significant chunk of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from interaction with family and friends to feeling belonging and connection. It’s integral. So why does the whole world feel so disconnected nowadays?

Empathy And Social Media

This has been said a million times before; people creating think pieces about social media while posting on said social media. But the comments I’ve seen are so mindless and egregious lately, ranging from insults to weird things that I’d never think to ask someone. From a purely psychological perspective, there’s no one consensus on how social media impacts empathy. Some studies suggest that heavy social media use can be correlated with higher empathy, while others say the exact opposite. For example, The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) and their collaboration with the University of Indiana discovered American users who reported higher usage had lower levels of empathy. This was a trend that didn’t waver significantly in terms of what type of social media, the measurement for empathy, age, gender or education—except in the face of ‘personal distress.’

Personal distress is defined as a “self-focused, aversive, affective reaction to the apprehension of another’s emotion (e.g discomfort or anxiety).” An example of this—such as the one used in this paper, is when a person feels anxious when seeing someone sad or upset. Personal distress is considered as a form of empathy, but it’s not to be confused with empathetic concern, because it’s fundamentally different. Empathetic concern is when you feel a sense of compassion, care or sympathy for another person, whereas personal distress is an individual feeling that tends to reflect distress not because of caring, but because the situation the person is in could happen to oneself. The study’s results imply that with increased social media use, our care for others lowers, but the consideration for ourselves heightens.

What ends up happening is two things. For one, it impacts the way we treat people. We become more desensitised to graphic events like war, violence, accidents, crime. How many news photos and videos have you seen online of tragic incidents that you just scroll past? There’s been so much going on and it’s only January. It seems like a bombardment of bad news everywhere that you can’t help but disconnect from. The second, is we start to think more about ourselves. We overanalyse every aspect of our beings—our appearances, our clothes, what we’re doing with our lives, if we’re doing enough. More susceptible to beauty standards, trends, conformity. Normal things become personally distressing when they otherwise shouldn’t be.

I do want to highlight that the above isn’t a given. The academic collaboration also mentions other research conducted in the UK, Spain and the Netherlands that indicates high social media use relates to more empathy, while a study in India doesn’t show a positive nor negative correlation. If you’re using social media a lot, it won’t necessarily dictate your empathy towards others. The SPSP touches on cultural differences and motivation for the use as factors that play a role as well, and even then, it’s not entirely concrete. But from a personal perspective the high use feeds into desensitisation, limited awareness of others’ feelings and even social understanding.

Lack Of Simple Dialogue

Simple things like small talk skills have been forgotten or neglected entirely. A lot of people don’t like small talk for a variety of reasons, and maybe they really can’t do it—and I understand that. I can be on that side sometimes when I’m not feeling particularly social, and I used to be so introverted and socially anxious that I couldn’t even look at another person in the eyes properly. But I hate to admit that it’s an important conversational tool even in its most basic act. Besides, it can be a little fun sometimes, just chatting for a little, talking to someone you maybe see a few times in the lift or at the store, or even just the one time. Small talk lets you have a brief insight into the other person’s life and personality. And the art of it is completely gone.

Maybe it’s a post COVID lockdown thing, but it seems people are more hesitant, more tired, more averse to chatting to one another. Years cooped up at home with nothing but a screen simulating real life communication can change your perception on how you engage with others. I see it in myself as well. I go out of my way to not bump into people. I wear headphones to limit contact, I pretend to look busy. For the three years I spent at university I only made two friends, and I genuinely tried to talk to people in my seminars—and they did too, but nothing was clicking. They were all fleeting moments of awkward socialisation. It all comes down to the fact that the thought of a person I don’t know speaking to me makes my heart flutter, and not in a positive way. I can imagine it’s a feeling most of you can relate to. It’s even worse to think that I may not even be talking to a person, but a robot instead.

AI Now Commonplace

To circle back to the beginning, this post was initially sparked by a tweet about a screenshotted TikTok I saw the other day. The girl in the video talked about how she used ChatGPT to create a message to send to her crush, but accidentally included the prompt in her text. According to the tweet, a lot of people in the TikTok comments—close to 350, related to her by giving similar examples where they turned to AI to write simple messages to other people, for homework, for daily tasks.

AI has a lot of shape and forms. From smart watches and cameras to the typical version you think about such as a generation or chat bot. Within this context, I’m soley referring to the second type. AI’s no longer a teaching or support tool used for learning and development, but now something more sinister and commonplace. I find it concerning that people are genuinely using AI as a subsitute for themselves when it comes to communicating, and it says a lot of things about how our society operates now.

There’s a level of detachment and laziness exhibited by people that they’ll go to such lengths to use a piece of equipment to communicate with someone instead of doing it themselves. Are you that detached that you can’t send someone a text by yourself, written with your own words, that you have to turn to AI to do it for you? Moreover, why would I want to talk to AI? If I’m texting you, I want to talk to just you, and not a robot. The conversation doesn’t have to be perfectly polished and constructed with the right words and proper grammar or anything at all. There’s a beauty in talking or texting someone and seeing how they communicate and all the intricacies that come with it. I also don’t want to constantly judge whether or not I’m having chatting with a real person.

Use this post as a reminder to up your communication (safely, of course—don’t just go up to random strangers or get into weird situations!). Just send the text yourself. People want to hear from you. Speak to your family or friends or partners more, in person. Meet new people. Get involved with your community, your campus, your clubs. Sharpen your verbal and written skill—write your homework, assignments, notes, lists, yourself. Nurture your communication and not AI’s. Put more effort into understanding and listening to people, care about things, use your digital world to interact with more meaningful things. Don’t lose the thing that ultimately makes us human.