Tech Loneliness - Solved!

How are we the most connected and most lonely in our history, at the same time!?! I heard this again the other day and began to consider what the root cause may be. This one is particularly wrought with symptom treatment propaganda, with the root cause buried under mountains of coached-up, self-healing, blah blah… at a packaged price. Well, no longer, here it is, gratis – we are executing galore, but rarely engaged.

Perhaps it’s a little easier to see if you grew up in the age of the land line. However, if you grew up text messaging someone on the same couch… a more robust explanation will clarify.

We perceive communication via our senses and our brain does the processing. So how much of the processor is activated while communicating? It depends on the method of communication. From a sensory perspective our brain dedicates resources (neurons) to senses with sight, touch, and hearing usually taking the lead in this context. If we think of neuron involvement like the level of processor investment you have in that communication…. essentially, you get a component of your maximum potential for engagement. By the numbers (1):

• Sight 30% of the cortex neurons
• Touch 8%
• Hearing 2%

Mapping each sense to their corresponding, modern communication method:

• Sight -> Video
• Touch -> Text
• Hearing -> Voice

Text has significantly more potential engagement than voice?? That seems off. So what gives? Text message has only one type of touch, the key pad or screen. Increasingly, speech-to-text is reducing it to a single touch or none (Hey Siri / Alexa / etc..). Effectively, this brings the potential way down. Moreover, there’s subvocalization... i.e. the internal voice you’re hearing while reading this. Does that mean text and voice have the same potential for engagement?

Text has many efficiency, speed, and perceived cost benefits, and has thus displaced a great deal of Voice use cases. What many have been experiencing is it comes at the expense of emotion, intention, tone, … in a word, “sentiment” is often lost or misunderstood.

Often referenced, Dr. Albert Mehrabian, author of Silent Messages (2), conducted several studies on nonverbal communication. He found 7% of any message is conveyed through words, 55% through nonverbal elements (facial expressions, gestures, posture, etc), and 38% through certain vocal elements. Let’s call those vocal elements “sentiment”. In short, this suggests Text and Voice are far from equal... 7 vs 38, or Voice is 5.4x greater. Let’s consider this as the second component for maximum potential engagement.

In what can be a perceived as text enrichment, emojis have arisen. And which form is exceedingly popular – faces. In many ways, it’s the most recent macro attempt to reduce the lost sentiment within text communication. But, how well is it doing? Moreover, does it have any impact on the depth of engagement.

There’s a mountain of research on emojis, which could consume all your reading cycles (e.g. here’s a paper on all the papers they could find (3)). However, within a paper on the “... Effects of Using Emojis” (4), there’s definitely an impact on sentiment. In some contexts, a ton! That said, it also shows that positive emojis on positive messages as well as negative emojis on negative messages have little to no impact. This possibly suggests the emojis aren’t taking Text to a greater depth. In that, I believe they have a relatively minor impact on this specific engagement context.

Before you come unhinged at that, do consider the extraordinarily high rate at which millennials flip service providers (e.g. banks) (5). Those digital natives simply aren’t engaged enough to be retained.

The last component is really a combination of interwoven concepts: real-time vs non-real-time and task vs multi-task. The framework of Text is read-respond and the response-rate expectation is a variable. For a text message on a mobile device, you hope it gets there and they are able to respond, but you may or may not know if it was “received” or “read” as these are configurable user settings (i.e. enable/disable). For text chat on a website, the variable is within the response. How many other things is the person doing, including this text message. How are they prioritizing my message? How focused will they really be?

A well researched parallel here is driving while using a mobile device (6). In short, driving requires a primary cognitive attention. Cell phone text or talking unseats driving’s primary position resulting in an increased risk of accident – text 8x and talk 4x. The National Safety Council (NSC) published data in 2010 that showed driving while using a cell phone resulted in a 37% reduction in spatial processing in the part of the brain used for the task of driving. Interestingly, they talk about inattention blindness and tunnel vision to describe the affects.

As you consider your communication with your family, friends, customers, and partners, ask yourself, are we just executing here or have we engaged.

(1) https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-vision-thing-mainly-in-the-brain

(2) http://www.kaaj.com/psych/smorder.html

(3) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02221/full#h10

(4) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.02860.pdf

(5) https://www.gallup.com/analytics/237734/ways-banks-win-keep-millennial-customers.aspx

(6) https://www.nsc.org/Portals/0/Documents/NSCDocuments_Advocacy/Cellphone-Impact-Teater-Construction-Div.pdf