The Name Tags are Necessary
I hear it from both students and clients these days. They dismiss social media as narcissism, self-absorption.
Social media is a messenger. It’s a phone or envelope, except it’s faster, more efficient, and more convenient than either of those older delivery systems. It can be just as personal and nuanced as a phone call or a letter or a short story if we are willing to write and read with the same candor, thought, and imagination.
Social media is language and imagery. If we don’t express ourselves as well as Hemingway or design as beautifully as Van Gogh, that’s on us.
Social media is equal to face-to-face communication because we fail at parties in the same way we fail to tweet well. At a party, we stick with the familiar. We talk to our friends about our kids and to strangers about the weather. That’s not communication, that’s routine.
Real communication is an open, unknown road to change. We’ll get defensive and polarized before we try that.
We reserve intimacy and the unknown road for quiet moments alone with those we trust, and maybe that’s the correct thing to do. But then why have parties? Why meet strangers? And how often do those great moments of conversation arrive within our own circles? Even in our closest relationships, we fail to connect and grow.
Good hosts give out nametags at parties because we are so bad at greeting as a species. The stickers break the ice. “Hello, my name is:” and then fill in the blank. Forced Mad Libs is our general level of expertise when it comes to conversation.
This is partly due to self-absorption. We often miss a person’s name because something is on our mind, we’re worried there is spinach in our teeth, or we’re worried we won’t recall the name. But that’s poor self-absorption; it’s self-isolation and fear.
Before social media, we let phone calls go to the machine. Before social media, we blamed shallow, 140 character sound bites on the television news or advertising slogans. A lack of depth was never the fault of the sentence or the digital sentence.
We don’t introduce ourselves or promote our ideas because we think that’s vanity. How’s that for irony? Having the confidence to look people in the eye and tell them who you are is courtesy. It used to be common courtesy.
Teaching communication has made me realize how much the manners we dismiss culturally as pomp or phoniness are the creativity that held society together previously. Citizens learn a common language of behavior to interact with one another because we are uncivilized without one.
You can’t blame its loss on screens. Interactive screens have forced more people out of their shells in the last ten years. People communicate more than ever before. It’s how poorly we do it that’s the problem.
Self-absorption and vanity in the right amounts is self-awareness and self-possession.
There are two important steps to good communication. “Hello” and “my-name-is-fill-in-the-blank.” You can also call those two parts “I want to meet you” and “I want you to meet me.” You can even call them empathy and confidence.
By nature, we break up into small tribes and attack one another. Good conversation is unnatural—a triumph of the imagination over base instincts. The first step is believing you have something to bring to the discussion. When I became a teacher, I had to acknowledge I had something to share even with colleagues older and more experienced than I. When people I admired thanked me, it was still a surprise.
This is the key to understanding the present so-called “failure” of the Web. We are at the beginning. We are babies and the bath water.
Who are any of us to give advice or knowledge? The smart and humble response of all of us should be I am fill_in_the_blank, or better yet, “you can find me @fillintheblank.”