Dr. Michael A. Brown Sr.
Next time you are out to eat, at the store, or even driving in your car, take a look around you. How many people are on their electronic device and not paying attention to the world around them? The answer is probably the majority of them. In today’s society, this is the reality that we are facing. Dr. Michael A. Brown Sr., recently took the time to speak with IGI Global on the importance of face-to-face communication and how our society can increase the amount of human interaction that we experience in a day.
IGI GLOBAL: What are some of the dangers of losing face-to-face communication experience?
DR. BROWN: Everyone will have to resort to face-to-face communication at some point. When you have to communicate in person, you are faced with emotional, physical, and environmental conditions and activities. Even if you choose to ignore them, they are there and they are integral to the interchange. Face-to-face communication is powerful because it’s hard not to feel something or to place you in someone else’s shoes when you experience emotion expressed on their face, hear it in their voice, or read it through a gesture or posture. This rich feedback is not as available in online communication. We have a human need to match our position with ideas and attitudes that resonate with us because we want to feel what they feel and see what they see. We may avoid it or be unaware, but this is the understanding and empathy that is so important to communicating. Research suggests that close and frequent connections with others make us healthier.
How does this topic relate to a trending topic in today’s world?
I believe people are realizing that human interaction is necessary to keep a sense of society and build real relationships. Today, the phone and the tablet dominate the way we communicate. Look around you while you’re driving through town, on the highway, or at a stop light. How many of the people around you are looking at an electronic device? They might be texting, reading e-mail, or searching for the best location for lunch, but they’re not fully watching the road and they’re certainly not involved in face-to-face communication. Now you’re at a restaurant and you see a table of 5 or 6 people together. None of them are looking at each other. Their eyes are on their phones, and the waiter or waitress is trying to get their attention about their order. The problem is that technology has their undivided attention.
What are the benefits to face-to-face communication?
Face-to-face communication creates a good level of social bonding, which is about awareness, or having a sense of the other person’s “body,” which includes their physical appearance, body language, and facial expressions. Good communicators will also have a sense of the other person’s makeup, jewelry, hair style, and clothing. Some of the research reviewed for this book indicated that people have a social, even complementary, perspective on the role of the body in communication. Social bonding benefits from the meaningful experiences between sender and receiver that can happen when they share a common physical space. Communicating in person creates benefits based on human contact, such as touching, eating, and drinking together. These interactions can be simulated in the digital conversation, or in some ways can be actual (via Skype or Face Time for instance). But only FTF can allow the full range of these social bonding benefits. Additional pluses come from off-the-cuff conversation such as family questions, gossip, jokes, or just idle chat. Social bonding is an invaluable consequence of FTF communication.
What are the benefits to online communication?
The online conversation allows us to connect with the environment and impact social welfare, putting us in touch with people and organizations that we might never otherwise discover. These activities and the technology that allows them are cutting-edge approaches to communicate in real time. Online communication is the fastest way to go from idea to communication, characterized by short bursts of energy. Trust comes easily and information can flow effortlessly even if there is noise in the channel. Noise in the channel is a problem in face-to-face communication.
Please describe the full cycle communication process.
The key to full-process communication is that it is cyclic, starting with the sender encoding and delivering the message, the receiver decoding the message, and finally the receiver providing feedback for the message. These actions should continue until the communication completes. The feedback part doesn’t always happen in FTF and tends to be rare in online communication. We can refer to several communication models as a basis, including Michael Argyle’s 1972 Communication Cycle, Wilbur Schramm’s 1954 Model of Communication that was later revised, and or the Shannon-Weaver Model of Communication. The Shannon-Weaver model is considered to the “mother of all models.” It was created in 1948 when Claude Elwood Shannon wrote an article entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in Bell System Technical Journal with Warren Weaver. This work established communication as an interactive process where the sender and receiver exchange messages and deal with noise in the channel, also referred to as barriers to communication (Sitkin, Sutcliffe et al. 1992, Wagner 1994).
What steps do you believe need to be taken to ensure that the next generation of digital natives has experience with the full communication cycle?
We need to introduce a hybrid approach to communicating that focuses on face-to-face but also takes advantage of the benefits of online interactions. The hybrid approach offers a new way of communicating that adjusts to variable and diverse interactions. The approach is sensitive to the environment in that there are ways to assess internal and external forces and adjust the message accordingly. The formal approach should work to counter uncertainty.
Some of the steps I offer in the hybrid approach are to start with engaged interaction, apply interactionism and networked individualism, and combine FTF and online interactions. Engaged interaction employs flexible, full-range communications to ensure that both parties listen, hear, and understand, and continue the interaction until that happens. An interactionist approach leverages the actions of social actors as we interpret the situations we face and make conscious choices on behavior. Social actors (senders) use the context of the interaction to adjust behavior to be complementary to the actions of other social actors (receivers). Interpretation of the situations we face affects how we encode and decode messages. Networked individualism refers to flexibility in messaging and actions, working with multiple and shifting work partners and executing partial involvements with shifting sets of workgroups. Ties extend across demographic boundaries and workers are free to choose their customers, the way in which they interact, and the time and place of those interactions (Wellman 2001). This is a social capital-building approach that focuses interaction on selected individual residents and their immediate social clusters (Wellman 2012). An important aspect of networked individualism is that online communicators can associate with a church or a job or some other group to transcend physical place, thereby achieving continuity and commitment that is not available in the traditionally large community groups we see in the online environment.
Online communications carry a potential risk of distrust, misunderstanding, and poor decision making if they are not connected with good interpersonal relationships. Being creative and adapting to personal and organizational needs and objectives can deliver unexpected benefits. “In some professional tasks CMC (computer mediated communication) was found to be superior to FTF, but CMC was even more effective when combined with FTF (Olaniran 1994).” Senders should strive to improve their message-to-medium fit to optimize the choice of media and type of use. The enhanced collaboration that should result is focused on task, message, media-mix, interaction partners, CMC competence, context, and optimal outcomes (Bubaš 2001). FTF and online communicators can use the skills for enhanced collaboration to improve interactions.
The bottom line to the hybrid approach is to make a connection, check that connection, provide feedback in the form of verification that both parties agree on the intent or goal, and then work to continued understanding and trust. I believe these steps are much easier to accomplish with the tools available through face-to-face, full-process communication. But we cannot forget about the benefits of online communication.
A sincere thanks to Dr. Brown for taking the time to discuss the importance of face-to-face communication with us. Please take a moment and view Dr. Brown's publications below:
References
Bubaš, G. (2001). Computer mediated communication theories and phenomena: Factors that influence collaboration over the Internet. 3rd CARNet users conference, Zagreb, Hungary, Citeseer.
Corman, S. R., A. Tretheway and B. Goodall (2007). "A 21st century model for communication in the global war of ideas." Consortium for Strategic Communication, Report 701.
Olaniran, B. A. (1994). "Group performance in computer-mediated and face-to-face communication media." Management Communication Quarterly 7(3): 256-281.
Sitkin, S., K. Sutcliffe and J. Barrios-Choplin (1992). "A Dual-Capacity Model of Communication Media Choice in Organizations." Human Communication Research 18(4): 563.
Wagner, E. D. (1994). "In Support of a Functional Definition of Interaction." American Journal of Distance Education 8(2): 6.
Wellman, B. (2001). Little boxes, glocalization, and networked individualism. Digital cities II: Computational and sociological approaches, Springer: 10-25.
Wellman, B. (2012). Networked individualism: how the personalized internet, ubiquitous connectivity, and the turn to social networks can affect learning analytics. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, ACM.
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