EQ … Tech?
A generally relatable scenario: you’ve sent an email to a coworker, and in all attempts to not let your frustrations show through the page, you used as much deferential language as possible. Yet, on your 15th re-read, it still sounds like you were possibly too aggressive. Their response comes back, polite but curt.
“Are they angry with me? Do they know I was annoyed with them?” you think, considering how to diffuse a situation that might not even be real. You can’t ask them — lest you potentially create a tense situation that didn’t exist if they didn’t, in fact, take your initial email personally, and you can’t just apologize for seeming short for the same reason — but it doesn’t seem right to just pretend nothing happened, either. After all, what if they are upset and you just never address the situation?
These situations happen often. Because of our tendency to project, and our general need to analyze certain cues — body language and tone, for example — when speaking face-to-face, textual communication can be difficult. Even a handwritten letter provides more general emotional cues than typed text: sloppy versus careful handwriting, the style of the writing itself, the state of the paper, the envelope it was sent in, the way it was addressed and signed off. The result of these lacking cues in much of our modern communication can be serious, ranging from a gentle misunderstanding that you can laugh about later, to a massive blowout. Although emojis and punctuation can assist us in demonstrating personality and tone, even these are not universally recognized to all mean the same thing, and they’re less meaningful to our mammalian brains than real, in-person displays of deference or affection.
Luckily, textual communication isn’t our only option. Video-conferencing software is possibly the closest imitation of face-to-face communication, and it absolutely does help. If everyone on a call keeps their camera on, we can much more effectively convey a sense of listening, providing feedback cues such as nods or “mmhmm”s that we look for when speaking to others. There is some semblance of body language cues that we are able to analyze as well — if our coworker from the copywriting department sets their jaw and crosses their arms, we may be able to quickly recognize we struck a nerve and manage their feelings appropriately. How often can we tell, though, when half of our team is answering emails while we’re talking? Or tapping their foot under their desk impatiently, or wringing their hands nervously below the view screen? The evidence of the impersonality, too, comes when one accidentally unmutes themselves and says something incriminating (I recently had one of these slip-ups — complaining to the person in the room with me about being asked by a videographer to move and set my computer somewhere more stable — the impersonal nature of the call allowing me to pretend that feelings wouldn’t be hurt if, well, I wasn’t on mute) or can be heard murmuring to a spouse or roommate in the middle of your presentation.
The point is, while technology is eager to provide us with more genuine ways to communicate, we’re still a long way from scalable tech that really mimics genuine face-to-face communication. Some tech spheres are focusing on “emotionally intelligent” tech utilizing things such as one’s heart rate from their exercise tracker, to lower incidents of road rage, for example. When it comes to communication technology, however, we’re still falling short of promising new technology to actually bring us closer together while we’re far apart.
