mdlbear | River: Talking long distance (Reply)

My long-distance communication style has changed quite a lot over the last few months; this post is basically a status report. This is the first of a series of three River posts about communication and conversation: the other two will be titled "Talking with you" and "Crosstalk".

Email:

Email is still my prefered long-distance communication style for most purposes. The main reason is that it's completely asynchronous: I'm not disturbing you if you're busy or not in, I don't have to feel pressured to reply promptly, and I can edit my entire message before I send it. If necessary, I can get a second opinion on a draft. I can even not send it. Email gives me time to think, and I write a lot better than I talk.

More, if I'm replying to some previous message of yours, I can quote it at length and respond in detail, with absolutely no question about whether I heard you correctly. I can take my time, and so can you.

On the down side, it's difficult to put emotion or tone of voice into an email; I do it occasionally with tags or emoticons or the occasional *hug*, but most people don't, and it's impossible to get that information out if it isn't there in the first place. It's also impossible to know whether an email has been received unless I get a response. If it matters, that can be a problem. It's probably not a good way to communicate with someone who rarely checks their email, and I know a couple of those.

For me, email is low stress and low bandwidth; it's never an interruption. I can check email when it comes in, or wait until several hours later when I'm not busy. I'm aware, however, that this isn't true for everybody. I've been using email in one form or another for three decades, and almost entirely on Unix; most people have come to it more recently, and have different expectations.

I know one person, for example, who almost always tries to follow up an email with an IM conversation to iron out any possible misunderstandings. I found it baffling until I noticed the way I handle phone calls from my coworkers: I usually walk down the hall to their office to follow up. So I can certainly understand this now. The difficulty is that I have a tendency to send email, especially personal email, just before leaving for something else. I might very well not be there for a follow-up. Result: an oblivious bear and a very annoyed correspondant the next day.

I'm also very likely to use a quick email to send a link or a bit of news, if I know one person or a small number of people are likely to be interested. (If it's of more general interest, these days I'll put it in my LJ.) I've never used email just to say hello in passing, but that may be changing.

By the way, if you're sending me email and want to make very sure I see it the next time I'm reading, start the subject line with "Reminder:" -- those get put into a special folder that I read frequently. This is especially true if you haven't sent me email before: people I correspond with regularly get put into topical folders like "filk" or "household". The "misc" folder gets less attention, and stuff can easily be missed.

Phone:

I'll be blunt: I've loathed telephones for decades. I've always seen a phone call as an interruption, and navigating a phone's user interface is several cuts below programming in machine language in user-friendliness and convenience (though it does beat patching binary decks on a keypunch -- just barely). And making calls has always been a nightmare. (I've explained this a little in of bananas and telephones.)

It can take hours -- sometimes even days -- for me to work up the nerve to make a non-business call to somebody I don't know. Even business calls are difficult: I'd rather use the Web if I can. I'm even very reluctant to call somebody I do know, because I don't know whether I'll be interrupting something. It's hard enough for me to walk up to somebody and start a conversation, for goodness sake -- that's a subject for a different post, though.

One reason it can take so long for me to make a call is that I have to have the initial stages -- the first couple of sentences, possible responses, and alternative replies -- planned out in my head beforehand. I don't "think on my feet" very well. In most cases, I'll even have to call back if I get an answering machine and wasn't expecting it, because I won't have a coherent message composed. Sorry about that.

Lately, though, I've discovered how much I enjoy actually talking on the phone to a friend. (/me waves at cflute.) There are problems, of course. I generally have to compose things in my head before I say them; there are going to be awkward pauses. I don't hear very well these days; I might have to ask for a repeat, or two, or three, and that's awkward too. It's especially bad if the environment is noisy; much of my usual lunchtime walk takes me alongside a busy street.

(Just as an aside, though, I really appreciate the way the cell phone has made it socially acceptable for me to talk to myself when I'm out walking.)

I have started gradually expanding the set of people I'm willing to call. I haven't quite gotten to the point where I'll call someone just to say hello -- there has to be a message, a question, or a pre-arranged schedule; otherwise I simply can't get past the psychological barrier of bothering somebody with nothing to say.

A few notes of caution: first of all, my memory for anything I've heard is next to nonexistant. If you want me to remember something, even for a few minutes, make sure I write it down and read it back to you. If you leave me voice mail make sure your name and number are near the beginning, because I'm going to have to play it back at least four times to make sure I've gotten it, and I won't recognize your voice.

Second, don't assume that I'll listen to my voice mail immediately, or even the same day you sent it. At work, especially, I'll find out about it the next time I pick up my phone, which may be sometime next week.

Third, unlike many people, I'm reasonably comfortable with silence. Probably more comfortable with it on the phone than in IM, because with IM there's no way of telling whether the person on the other end of the line is still there, or has gone away. If I can't think of anything to say, or if I'm trying to compose a complicated thought into words, expect a pause.

IM:

I'm very new to Instant Messaging. In the space of the last six months I've gone from a non-user to an addict, and most of the way back. I think I can handle it now. I'm still pretty bad at it.

I have a couple of problems with IM. First of all, you can only edit the bit you're about to send. Once you've sent it, it's gone, even if you were hasty, stupid, or just plain wrong. This makes it stressful. Even if you try to correct something, the other person has already seen it. Some things just can't be called back.

Second, because it's going on in realtime, with somebody waiting at the other end, I'm under a lot of pressure to respond quickly; this increases both my stress level and the probability of miscommunication. (After a little more experience, this seems only to be a problem with some people. Others are perfectly OK with the idea that I might get a phone call or go to the bathroom between one thought and the next.)

Third, it's slow. In part because I'm trying to compose something on the fly, and in part because I simply don't type as quickly as I can talk, a conversation that might take five minutes or so face to face or on the phone can stretch out to over an hour on IM.

It's even slower because both parties are using computers, and are in separate environments; there's guaranteed to be something else going on that the other side has no way of knowing about. Email, work, an ongoing conversation,... One of us might get a phone call, or have to leave for an emergency bathroom break. I'm learning to use this to my advantage, to pace my replies in order to think and possibly even get a few things done.

Finally, it's almost as much of an interruption as a phone call. More, in some ways; with a call to my cell phone I can at least go out for a walk. (Less in other ways; I can eat my lunch and sometimes even get work done during an IM conversation, if I pace it.)

Another problem with IM is that I don't always get much guidance about whether it would be an interruption to the person on the other end. I'm usually pretty good about attaching a suitable message to my status, but I know that many other people aren't; I tend to assume the worst.

That said, I like IM, and I use it (with a very limited number of people). As I said, I'm a recovering addict. In the past I've had a great deal of trouble putting limits on IM conversations; a quick wave just before lunch has been known to expand into a deep, intense dialog that eats up the entire afternoon. An injudicious turn of phrase can mushroom into hours of agonizing damage control. On the other hand, almost all of the time and stress involved were due to the particular person, relationship, and incidents involved and can't be blamed on the communication medium we were using. On the gripping hand, I'm still a little gun-shy.

IM is actually the only medium where I'm willing to start a conversation even if I have nothing to say, and no question beyond "How's it going?" These days I try not to do it more than once or twice a week unless I'm feeling particularly lonely or talkative, and I'm more likely to do it shortly after you come online. But if my status says I'm available, I'll be happy to reply if I can. Be sure to let me know if you have time constraints, and I'll try to speed things up. I'll do the same, if it's getting close to a meeting or something.

Just to say hello:

The main change over the last few months is that I've come to welcome simple social contact and brief, casual conversation -- along the lines of meeting in the hallway at work or at a con. I occasionally even initiate such contact, at least on IM. I expect that, overdone even a little, it would be a problem, but that hasn't happened so far.

When you get down to it, my main form of casual contact these days is LJ comments. They have the editability and asynchrony of email, they're as quick and casual to dash off as IM, and they're always about something, so there's an excuse to write.

That's always been my biggest problem: starting a conversation. I'm delighted to get the occasional greeting out of the blue -- it happens so rarely that it sometimes feels like a major event. But I hardly ever send one, in part because the results have not always been all that positive, but mostly because I rarely feel that I have something to say to any one person in particular. Usually I don't have an audience in mind, so I'll post it and sometimes get a handful of replies.

The idea that there may be one or two people who might actually call me even if they have nothing in particular to say beyond "Hello" is, at this point, pure fantasy. The idea that there might be a few people out there (besides my mother) who wouldn't mind hearing from me even if I have nothing in particular to say is still completely new and, I guess, a little frightening.