I guess before I start I should explain the events leading up to and the thoughts behind this post.

It all started a few days before the end of Sixth Form, There was a few things I wanted to say to someone (The fact that I never got the chance to say it to her possibly indicates that I messed up yet again). It soon became clear that I wasn’t the only one that was having these thoughts, others around me were equally as indecisive about things that they wanted to say, after a lot of thought on the matter though, I confined it to the darkest depths of my mind.

However, more recently I was part of another conversation discussing a situation similar to the one I found myself in, and again the same issue was raised (not by me this time), so I guess this post is a combination of the thoughts and ideas that were spawned from both occurrences.

In any conversation there are usually 3 different channels of communication open at one time:

• Semantics (The meaning or the interpretation of a word or sentence)

• Intonation (The use of changing pitch to convey syntactic information)

• kinesics (nonverbal bodily movements, such as gestures and facial expressions)

All of the above methods of communication are used in all conversation to some degree. Different situations have a bias on a particular method of delivery, for example, when you are trying to find out if someone is lying to you the 2 main ones are intonation and Kinesics, the semantics are irrelevant for the most part because you already have a suspicion that they are lying. However, having said that there is still a hierarchy of importance, the intonation is more important than the semantics but less important than the kinesics, this doesn’t mean that the intonation is useless, in fact singularly each one won’t provide a definitive answer, each one of the channels cascades down the hierarchy and eventually, based on the outcome of each channel a proper conclusion can be made. Even the most subtle of things could betray the person and reveal the truth, the stress levels of someone’s voice – Is their voice shaky or does it crack up when they protest?.

However in this scenario the most important thing to look for is the Kinesics, some people can belie the calmness in their voice and the reasonable explanation that they give by the actions that they make, the tiny movements, the fact that they can’t look you in the face, fidgeting and other similar things can give it away.

This brings me to the whole point of this post, why are certain methods of communication not suitable for certain things?

Phone Calls

Phone calls have only 2 of the mentioned 3 communication channels that can be taken advantage of, Semantics and Intonation. This is good for most things, but for those conversations that you need to be able to use all 3 it’s not the ideal option. Because the person is not there in front of you, there can be problems with interpretation, and other things that require kinesics in order to properly clarify the person’s thoughts.

Text messages

Text messages only have 1 out of the 3 communication channels, this is the single most fundamental failure of text messages as a communication technology, they only allow semantic messages and only allow a one way method of communication. Because only words make up the message, it is very hard to tell the way in which a person meant something, the context and the meaning of something can only be truly understood when you combine all three methods together. Text messages are inherently contextless, messages could be interpreted differently than they otherwise would on something such as a phone call, and this could lead to a cascading effect of the wrong interpretation on the part of both people.

Email

Email, like Text messages are flawed when it comes to really delicate situations, I’m not going to go into it again, but all of the above reasons still apply, although in emails favour, it is a bit more of a two way communication method, but it’s still not quite there.

Face to Face

By far the best form of communication ever invented. It incorporates all of the techniques into one very nice package, all of the necessary things are ‘in there’, all of the things that you can use is right there in front of you, all you have to do is know how to read it. With talking to someone face to face, more emphasis is put on the context and intonation of the conversation, it’s not all about semantics, in fact, if you think about it, language has a disconnected role to play in all this, how many different languages are there in the world? And how many people communicate their true feelings in those different languages, body language especially is independent of semantics.

When talking to people face to face, there is no misunderstanding about how something was meant to sound because instinctively you know how things were meant within the context they were spoken.

This post was the conclusion of many hours of thought, not only by me, but some other people that I have spoken to, albeit to a lesser degree of distinction, some of it may be self explanatory, but some of it may not.