How to Network With Busy People ? Part 10 (Blog)

[Savage]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

How to Network With Busy People ? Part 10

[Basu]

While i agree with your basic premise about face to face communication being more effective than long-distance, I think you give up on textual communication too easily. In particular you say:

When you communicate remotely, much of the connection you feel is rooted in illusion. You may harbor very deep thoughts and feelings when typing an email, but only some dull text gets delivered to the other person’s inbox, not the whole mental and emotional context that spawned that text. Similarly, when you read someone’s reply, you’re adding your own mental and emotional context to it, which is going to distort the message quite a bit. Most of the connection you feel with the other person is just you connecting with different aspects of yourself.

There is some truth to the statement, but I'm a bit surprised that you accept the idea of illusion etc. so easily, since you're an established blogger yourself. Yes, we do use our words to create illusions, but good writing uses illusions to present the truth more vividly. What is delivered is not 'dull text' but a very complicated emotional package. The author impresses his own logical-emotional ideas on the text and then the reader has to fill in the blanks. It's up to the author to use his or her skill and experience to craft the writing in such a way that the blanks get filled in the right way. Is this much different from something like making a good impression in a face to face meeting. Your clothes, appearance and manner are illusions in some way or the other but you use them to communicate the version of you that you would like to perceive. Hopefully you do this honestly, but it's certainly possible to very deceptive.

Now I accept that crafting writing in such a way as to ellicit a particular response is hard and that most people lack the sufficient experience to do it, but that is an issue orthogonal to whether or not text by itself is 'dull' or is life like. By simply dismissing text as 'dull' you are ignoring the fact that the primary medium of communication between people over long distances has been text and that books and letters have often spawned great acts and generated emotional responses from people across space and time.

On another note, I also disagree with your hypothesis that IM is a step up from email. I like email for exactly the same reason that you dislike it: it is fundamentally asynchronous. I like being able to think through my responses and say exactly what I want to say without having to worry about whether or not the other person will say something before I've finished. I dislike phone calls for the same reasons: there's too much pressure to act without thinking. In fact, the only situations in which I engage in an IM conversation is if it's with a friend where we're brainstorming or talking about something that isn't really very important and so it doesn't quite matter what we say. In fact, I wrote a blog post about why I'm not giving up email just yesterday.

In conclusion, while your core message still makes perfect sense, I think you make a number of generalizations without fully thinking the matter through.

[munish]

But ,we still need phone and email to take an appointment for face to face conversation.

[chrisrushton]

i guess what you're saying is true to an extent, i totally agree about thinking responses through. sometimes it's best to be spontaneous though.

i know that given a choice between text, im, email and face to face, i'd always choose the face to face. it's just so much easier to communicate. skype and video calling isn't a bad option, if you're in different countries for example. face to face is still the best though.

[Daffy Duck]

When I started connecting with other people in a business context, fresh out of college, I was surprised at how much they joked around and had fun with each other.

Same here, Steve! There's a lot of fun and joking in business, I've found. Most of the clients I work with are highly educated with a minimum of PhD and most of them like to just goof around too. I always thought they would be boring or serious. It's nice because I'm quite playful myself.