The document discusses changes in communication over time from in-person dialogue to modern technology-driven methods like social media. It notes that early communication was limited and person-to-person, favoring effective dialogue. However, inventions like the telephone, email, and now social media have increasingly favored ease of communication over effectiveness and relationship-building due to a lack of nonverbal cues. While feeling more connected, these modern methods have replaced true dialogue with shallow monologues, negatively impacting relationships unless addressed.

1. Communication in the
Face book (FB) era
(Communication –Then & Now)
Jayadeva de Silva
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget demonstrated that, when two young
children talk, they do so in monologue. Each child speaks in
response to the fact that the other child has spoken but ignores
what the other child has actually said.
As we develop, we learn how to enter into a proper dialogue with
each other. We are now living era where the social-media era is
part of a technology-driven trend that favors monologue-type
communication and creates significant pitfalls when it comes to
building effective interdependent relationships. We need to find
out how to overcome these pitfalls and build effective
interdependent relationships in the social-media era.
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2. If you go back through history, you can see that the world of
communication has gone through a period of immense change. In
1775, Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster.
Before that, communication was limited and, for the most part,
person-to-person. Dialogue ruled supreme as the communication
tool of preference. It was about 100 years later, in the 1870s, that
the telephone was invented. Over the ensuing years, people
discovered they could communicate with each other much more
easily using this new communication medium.
For all its undoubted ease of use, telephone conversations do
however lack nonverbal cues that can be extremely important
when dealing with others. These cues help each of us to adjust
continuously what we say during a conversation in ways that take
into account the other person's reactions to what we are saying. As
a result, the introduction of the telephone eliminated an important
element of dialogue.
Subsequently, the advent of the computer led to the Internet and
the advent of email. Unfortunately, while this is an even more easy-
to-use method of communication in which both parties are
relieved of the task of thinking on their feet, it completely
eliminates all spontaneous cues from the other person. Because of
this ease of use, very soon after its introduction, emailing took over
from telephoning as the preferred method of communication.
As people favored ease of communication over the rigors of
effective dialogue, relationship building suffered. If you look at the
content of emails as compared with telephone conversations or one-on-one
interactions, you see a much greater focus on task first, relationship second.
Time moved on, and nowadays, many people don't answer their
mobile phones but rely on voice-mail communication. Throughout
all of these changes, people have favored ease of communication
over effectiveness of communication and have become less and
less motivated to put real effort into relationship building. The
world became task focused and people had less time for the
niceties of real-life interaction. Not surprisingly, manners,
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3. deference toward others, and the capacity to express oneself
effectively have all became casualties in the process.
Nowadays we have Face book, Linked In, and Twitter, to mention
but a few of the ever-increasing social-media resources now
available to us all. These continue to encourage us to place less and
less emphasis on interactive dialogue as the basis of interpersonal
communication. While we all feel we are communicating effectively
when we use these tools, true dialogue has given way to a shallow
form of monologue.
This adversely impacts each of us negatively when it comes to
relationships. There is a clear challenge that each of us needs to
address if we are to avoid the pitfalls created by the social-media
era.
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