Column: Lost art of communication results in human disconnect

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mike Smith, owner of Shiny Shoes in downtown Carson City, last Sunday to talk about his "Ideas on Tap" concept as a monthly community event in the Nevada state capital.

What struck me was not so much Smith's uncanny skill at conversation, something that tends to come naturally in the shoe shine trade and for retired high school principals with more than three decades of service in education; but rather his ability to turn a newspaper interview into a face-to-face conversation between two individuals.

Smith did that Sunday, and I found myself engrossed in conversation with him on the topic of interpersonal communication, or rather the lack thereof in modern culture.

Human communication has suffered greatly with the advancements in technology. What was originally designed to make communication easier has actually disrupted it.

As a news professional, fully engaging a source one-on-one, face-to-face has always been an important value for me. I prefer to interview as though having a conversation, as opposed to the impersonal question-and-answer format.

Yet, even I found myself glancing down at my smartphone Sunday during the half-hour that Smith and I spent talking about the disconnect between human beings in today's world of digital communication.

To say our culture has become dependent upon our technology is a gross understatement. My heart rate picks up a few extra beats if I happen to walk out the door without my phone. It's like a drug that I think I have to have with me all of the time.

When I go out into the community, even I find myself looking down at my phone as I walk, a hazardous habit to get into. I see many others doing the same thing; their necks bent forward, heads down, thumbs scrolling while putting one foot in front of the other... and not seeing at all what lies before them.

From shoppers in grocery stores to diners in restaurants, people have their faces fixed on their tablets or smartphones frequently, almost constantly.

A couple sitting across from each other during a romantic dinner should be looking longingly into one another's eyes. Instead, I often see people looking at their phones while talking at each other.

Yes, I said talking at, not talking with. There's a big difference.

Just about anyone can talk at or to another person. All we have to do is move our lips and sound our voices in the direction of someone else.

But you cannot talk with someone if your attention is elsewhere.

I cannot reasonably talk with Smith while looking down at my smartphone and checking Facebook, because my attention is not on him; it's on my device. I'm disengaged with Smith when I do this. I hear him, but I'm not really listening.

Human beings cannot effectively communicate unless we are listening. It's not enough to hear with our ears. We have to communicate also with our eyes, our faces, our gestures and our posture.

Because people today tend to talk at or to each other, we've lost a critical connection as human beings. This disconnect has led to a break-down in interpersonal communication and even a paradigm shift, of sorts, in human relationships.

Exhibit A: The way we talk at or to one another on social media.

The technology of the Internet and Worldwide Web over the past 25 years or so has given human beings a seemingly endless way to communicate. And yet, the quality of our communication has ironically declined in that time.

Have you ever said something to someone through social media that you would never say to them face to face? I sure have, and I imagine most other people have, too.

This sort of behavior is textbook passive-aggression, according to Psychology Today, and it's very unhealthy to individuals and those around them.

"Passive-aggressiveness is a tendency to engage in indirect expression of hostility," Psychology Today states.

When we engage each other in a negative back-and-forth banter on the Internet, Web and/or social media, we are acting passive-aggressively toward one another. We say the most inconceivably vile things to each other in the digital world that we would in all likelihood not have the nerve to say in person.

What makes us feel so empowered that we deliver such vitriol into one another's inboxes or onto each other's pages?

The human disconnect caused by communication technology is a very sad irony, because we have the vehicles now to do so much more good for so many others. Yet, we choose instead to let these digital tools bring out the worst in us.

I'll take my liberty here and suggest that the human disconnect in our interpersonal communication is one of the chief reasons why so many people are shutting down inside and later lashing out with violence.

The disconnect leads to a devaluing of humanity. We don't value each other enough to communicate face-to-face. Others are less important than ourselves or those in our own little tight-knit worlds to bother talking with someone instead of the convenience of talking at or to them. We don't really engage them that way.

I see posts all of the time on Facebook, sending and reinforcing negative messages about our own kind: Humans are bad, we don't deserve animals, we don't deserve each other, we don't deserve happiness or contentment, we are pests, we are an infestation, we are the scourge of the earth, so on and so forth.

What sort of impact do you suppose these messages have on the impressionable or vulnerable human minds that read them almost constantly?

I think we have, either purposely or unwittingly, managed to dehumanize other people as little more than digitized nuisances instead of the human beings that they are.

A severe breakdown in interpersonal communication has led to this dehumanizing disconnect, which, in turn, has jaded our view of human life and its value.

We just do not care, and we have made this very clear. I see messages of "I don't give a f--k or d--n" about anything or anyone posted every single day on social media, whose feeds are clogged with the same sort of shares being passed around.

Is this really the message we want our youth to hear and the values we want them to inherit as they prepare to lead in the future?

I think it's far beyond time that we relearn what conversation is all about and rediscover the connection between one another, the common thread of our own humanity.

We must learn to talk with each other. Talking at or to one another only creates antagonism. We have a seemingly bottomless pit of space on social media, in email and other digital formats to say whatever we want and as much as we want without interruption.

But conversation requires us to speak with our ears and listen with our mouths. Smith calls it pretending to be elephants when we are together.

We are so zealous about making our own points heard, because that's the habit we've gotten into on social media and the Internet. We miss the points made by others.

We spend most of our time formulating an answer, a response or a retort that we completely miss what someone else has said. We aren't listening to them and they are evidently not important enough for us to give them even an ounce of our attention.

Renowned psychiatrist Sigmund Freud might conclude that the self-serving human "Id" has taken over the Internet, the Web and especially social media. We use these vehicles to stroke our own egos and put others down beneath us in order to build ourselves up.

If there is any hope of this human disconnect around and rediscovering each other as human beings rather than pixels on a screen, then we need to care first; about one another and about human life, in general.

The digitized process of dehumanization through the absence of real interpersonal communication needs to stop.

Our humanity is something we all have in common, regardless of skin color, ethnic origin, sexual orientation or identity, religious beliefs, abilities, political persuasions and so on. All of that needs to be checked at the door. Those are not important in establishing interpersonal communication with another person.

Our shared humanity is.

While understanding our differences is an important part of learning to get along, embracing our commonalities is even more crucial to acknowledging our own humanity. We cannot establish even the most basic, rudimentary human relationships without first finding common ground.

We do that by connecting with each other in conversation.

We can't go on telling the rest of humanity to "f--k" itself and expect our lives to get any better. They won't, because we won't.

When I realized I was peeking at my phone frequently in conversation with Smith on Sunday, I had to check myself and I finally hit the button that made the screen go blank. I looked at Mike as we talked, and I focused on listening more than speaking.

The benefit, or reward if you will, is that I accepted Mike's invitation to get to know him better. And as he listened to me speak, Mike got to know me better, too.

This, folks, is known as the simple, but lost art of human communication.

Despite what you read, hear and see in your daily social media feeds, all is not yet lost forever. We are not hopeless cases or causes. We can restore human connection through appropriate communication, and with that, we can regain our lost sense of humanity.

But we have to care first.