Social Media Communication: Part I

“Previously, I used to get gifts for my birthday; Now, I am getting notifications”, a friend of mine recently quipped.

Gabriel García Márquez famously quoted that everyone has three lives: Public life, private life, and secret life. It is now safe to include fourth life into everyone’s life: Social Media life.

With the rise of innovators and disruptors in the field of technology, social media has unprecedented influence on the human communication from the way we order taxis (Uber) to the way we find love (Tinder).

To understand how social media is affecting communication, we must first understand human communication itself.

Communication is a delicate interplay that takes place between individuals in any formal/informal setting who are subtly trying to influence each other with the exchange of feelings and emotions with little emphasis on the actual words, which is unique for each conversation cannot be paraphrased in one article.

Presenting the entire scope of communication is beyond the scope of this article and even beyond my abilities to comprehend communication. So, I will mention few important aspects of communication.

1.     Communication is 60% body language, 20% words, and 20% how they are said. In direct communication, many factors (even the kind of scent) may influence someone’s judgement. Although, I read many articles on why this may be wrong, I can say categorically that it is true.

2.     Communication starts even before talking. Although, we assume that communication starts with speaking, real communication starts when we acknowledge the presence of another person. We already started reading their body language subconsciously even before speaking to them.

3.     This leads to First impressions: Human beings has an incredible ability to go into a completely unknown situation and make almost accurate prediction of the entire situation. More information on first impressions can be found on Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book Blink (2007).

4.     Human beings not only communicate but we communicate about communication itself. We validate with our facial expressions/body language whatever being said.

5.     There are levels of communication which comes with the societal statues of values and limitations. We act differently around different people. If I act similar with my boss and my friend, I would be out of job by now. There are things I can share with my friend that I can’t share with my mother. There are things I don’t talk to my brother but share with my girlfriend. We generalize this phenomenon as “Presence of Mind”.

6.     Finally, an important aspect of communication is lying. Human beings lie all the time. As a matter of fact, we are evolved to lie. Sometimes we lie to avoid rejection. Julius Fast in his famous book Body Language (1961) called this form of lying face saving tactics. While there are many reasons for lying, it is important to remember that lying is an important aspect of communication.

In part II, I will discuss how social media is influencing each of these elements in human communication.