Normally, I wouldn’t chime in, I would just quietly observe and identify patterns. But I am a communication scholar and the patterns that I currently see all point to one communication problem: we are oversimplifying the concept of communication. We think that if we mute certain voices, we will be able to amplify others. We don’t know how to ask the right questions. We fail to account for experiential bias. We don’t choose the right medium to match the message. I’ve even heard people say, “Just listen. it’s not that hard.” These things are all oversimplifying what it means to communicate. It is that hard. If you think it’s easy, it just means you only have one group of people in your life who communicate in a homogenous way. But communication doesn’t work like a formula. It’s not going to give you the same result if you keep applying it in the same way.
It’s not enough to carefully craft a message. At the very basic SMR (sender, message, receiver) level, you’d be discounting the role of the sender and the receiver. Different perspectives, experiences, backgrounds, etc… all lead to different interpretations of the same message. Probably the most controversial example I can come up with is President Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” For those who remember, it caused a lot of problems even though it was a concise, simple message. The disconnect was in the communication between the sender and the millions of receivers. Some people saw “America” as only representative of one group of people, so the message became an aggravator. Some saw “great” as an allusion to imperialism and not a symbol of pride. Those who have been marginalized and discriminated against had a difficult time interpreting “again,” because they never saw America as great to begin with. In the end, while the message was probably intended as a unifying slogan, it received a muddled response. One side saw the message negatively and responded accordingly. Senders of the message were confused by the negative response and assumed a lack of national pride.
In order for a message to be received as intended, we need senders to consider the interpretations of the receivers, but we don’t like to think about that. We assume that the responsibility of understanding should be on the receivers because crafting a message is hard enough. In reality, the responsibility to consider the senders and receivers regardless of the message should be on both sides. That’s hard, but I’m going to make it even harder.
What about the message? Isn’t that where the information is? Yes, and also, kinda. The message itself is only a small part of the communication process. I quote Marshall McLuhan a lot because he’s defined the medium as the message. The truth is that how we choose to distribute the message adds to the meaning of the message. For example, I’m delivering this message in a written format, even though I could have chosen to create a video or a podcast or just verbally deliver it to a group of people. Each one of those options changes the message in some way. But there’s something else: my choosing to make this a written message means that I’ve actively rejected the attributes of meaning that another format could have contributed. Another format would have made this message more visual or audible, which would have added another layer of understanding to the receivers. Basically, this format only caters to the best way I can communicate.
Ok, so the medium changes the message, but we also need to talk about the platform. That changes the message too. All of the formats that we talked about can be disbursed in a variety of ways. If I use myself and this message as an example again, I can note that this was published on my platform where the context adds meaning and identifies me as a critical thinker who has other platforms. There’s no commenting section, so receivers can’t engage. There’s also the note that only people I share this with are likely to see the message, which means I’m limiting my audience. Am I communicating? Sure, but I’m not allowing a lot of room of discussion, so it might not be very effective if I’m not presenting opportunities for feedback.
Collectively, my message, medium, platform, and audience are all intentional, but I also want to talk about the role of feedback. Earlier, I referenced how different perspectives, experiences, backgrounds, etc… all lead to different interpretations of the same message. For the most part, it’s difficult to account for these, unless you know people very well. Feedback helps define some of these missing pieces. The problem is that many people are choosing to disburse messages without providing the option for feedback (myself included). Here’s the important thing I wish people would realize: feedback helps change the message as well. I don’t think telling people to “just listen” is an effective communication tool when it comes to difficult topics. Meaning is cultivated mutually (and we can talk about semantics and hermeneutics and epistemology later).
If we’re explaining a difficult concept to someone and skipping over key details because we assume they’re already understood, we’re confusing people. In their confusion, the receivers may assume that we don’t really care about their understanding and that the difficult concept that we’re explaining is probably not worth understanding anyway. The opposite can also be true. If we’re overexplaining a difficult concept because we assume receivers aren’t familiar with any parts of it, we can be alienating the audience. Receivers may assume that they already understand most of our message and we have nothing more to contribute. There’s not really a way to solve this issue without feedback. We need some kind of cues that receivers are listening, processing, connecting, engaging… But if we open that door, we could be met with criticism, backlash, and judgment. It just feels easier to rely on the message to do the work.
In conclusion, communicating is difficult and very complicated. I’ve crafted studies, ethnographies, earned degrees, created content, read, discussed, and debated. I’m still not an expert. My biggest fear is that we’re going to fight and argue and miscommunicate because we don’t understand communication. We blame a wide variety of things and then we attempt to resolve those things (and sometimes those things are serious problems that need to be resolved), but we don’t really contribute to knowledge or understanding that could help us in the future. With any new problem that comes up, we’re going to respond the same way and then we’ll get frustrated because it all seems so clear from our perspective and we can’t find a way to make the other side see it that way.
There’s not really a resolution. We just need to admit that communication is complex. There are a lot of models. Some don’t work. Some only work in certain contexts. Some are being misused. There is a lot of room for things to go wrong. It’s frustrating. So please stop yelling.