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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EalMVQ4TcUw
children's how many of you are huggers you like Doug everyone okay MTV are anti huggers if somebody tried to hug me right now I'm a punch in the nose okay you go hug her just getting but as kids were all taught the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you if that's the case hunger should hug everyone clearly something's missing consider
instead what I call the plant numeral doing the others the way they want to be done to so we hugged the hookers we don't have the entire huggers nobody gets punched in the nose a great example of this is the front of an ambulance on the front of name go into says ambulance but it says it backwards so when they come up behind you you can
read it in your rear view mirror and get out of the way you think the lights and sirens would help but they want to communicate with you quickly and effectively literally life and death can hang on this communication yet we don't use the same theory when we talk to one another instead we revert back to the golden rule and communicate with everyone else the way that
we personally find best according to the ten thousand our theory we should be expert communicators by the age of ten I've done the math fifteen seconds or less recap the average person speaks twenty two thousand five hundred words per day and read of a hundred and ten words per minute that's two hundred and four minutes per day speaking or roughly three point four hours per day
ten thousand hours about about three point four hours per day comes to just over eight years the average person begin speaking between one and two two years old plus eight years brings me to the edge of town the reason I have a career in conflict resolution is that people get into a lot of conflict most often because of poor communication I can tell you we are
not expert communicators by the age of ten some of us never that's why many lawyers judges marriage counselors have jobs and now we're in the information age were we communicate digitally but what is digital communication digital communication is just written communication human beings have been communicating in writing for more than five thousand years but are written communication is not very effective consider this simple five word
sentence depending on which of the five words I emphasize the into higher meaning of the sentence changes I didn't tell you that I didn't tell you that I didn't tell you that I didn't tell you that I didn't tell you that five words five different meanings yet if this is in writing which of those five are you going to guess that I met in a series
of studies at UCLA they surmised that when we're trying to communicate our feelings about a subject our believability comes from our nonverbal communication our tone of voice but also the words we choose to use fifty five percent of our communication comes from our non verbal what we look like where we are our body language thirty eight percent comes from our tone of voice the words we
emphasize only seven percent comes from the words that we choose to use yet in the information age in our digital communication this is all we send so in this age of drastic dot technological expansion we continue to use five thousand year old technology despite excluding a huge percentage of our communication for example I sent my brother this email but how did you take it do you
have a bad day at work get no fight with a friend or maybe if in a car accident or did he take it in a playful way it was intended from its Big Brother so much for communication is left unsaid and up to the receivers perception this is nicely illustrated in what's known on the internet as pose law pose law states the without some additional designation
is humor it's impossible create a parity that is so outrageous someone will not mistake the parity for the genuine thing check out any message board or comment section on the internet you're bound to see this taking place another example of pose line action was the work of Stephen Colbert while on his satire news show the Colbert report some people found his parity believable so believable in
fact that they were shocked when he dropped the act and started being himself and in this case we had the benefits of word choice tone of voice and nonverbal clues to his satire the problem of recognizing satire in written form is not a new one as early as the fifteen eighties an English printer suggested that we could utilize a reversed question mark to denote sat tire
in written form a more recent attempt at of the Netherlands suggested we could utilize this mark to denote ironic statements untaxed I've never seen this used anywhere yet another idea was the creation of a sarcasm font the idea was rather than regular font or italics what if we used reverse italics to to note sarcasm in the early days of the internet I would have loved a
sarcasm font problem with these is that human beings have more than one emotion so one font style one punctuation mark is never going to account for all of the possible human emotions if you believe the movies we have five main emotions and depending on the relative levels of those main emotions as they get mixed up in combined to one another we get more complex and so
it's never going to work to just use one font style to denote human beings emotions but in nineteen eighty two on a message board at Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott foreman suggested something new something that has worked he suggested the S. now we all recognize this today but you have to remember professor Forman was first so he actually had to follow this with read it sideways
in the same post he also recognize that the opposite could be used but I'm not going to dwell on the negative here now we have a way of communicating a motion with in the text emoticons which is a portmanteau combining a motion an icon were born and evolved happy flirty silly kisses and more because well it's sad angry frustrated crying but even neutral emotions infant actions
third even specific emoticons for people like Santa Claus here some estimates put the number of emoticons in that thousands emoticons further involved into the emoji a single character to represent the string of characters in the emoticon this safe space which becomes important in a minute and also allows us to convey additional information that's been missing from our written communication for five thousand years perhaps you could
say that emoticons emoji is have helped us to compensate for something but what we are compensating for is very important let's look back at what we're communicating digitally when I send that email to my brother I'm only sending seven percent of the message by utilizing emoticons and emojis I can put back at least a portion of that tone of voice that's been missing from our electronic
communication emoticons emoji is have also stood the test of time some of you may think I'm jumping the gun here you might think that this is just a fad for young people remember emoticons cannot nineteen eighty two that's three and a half decades and counting and this is the information age fads come and go within a year think plunking or the ice bucket challenge those were
huge and gone in a year emoji so become so entrenched that people started considering them a language unto themselves consider the attempt by Fred Bennison to translate Moby Dick into emoji two hundred and seven thousand words into ninety three thousand Mochis apparently in this case a picture's worth two point two words in this age of interconnected this we communicate a lot estimates put the total number
of phone calls in the world each day a ten billion that's a lot or is it compare that with the worldwide text messages per day of fifty billion emails per day of two hundred sixty nine billion Facebook what set messages of sixty billion apple I. messages per day a forty billion and even telegraphs fifteen billion that's the apt not the eighteen forties and that's not to
mention the myriad of other apps that are out there in the heyday of the postal or snail mail system they never average more than one point five billion per day we are communicating and shorter and shorter ways world leaders are reducing their thoughts into tweets the Gettysburg address is revered for its complexity and brevity coming in at only two hundred and seventy two words now politicians
are coming in at a hundred and forty characters or less if written out fully Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address would've needed at least eleven tweets perhaps this is what president Lincoln would have done today as we are trying to say more with less space making more and more important announcements in the shortened formats and even engaging in political discourse understanding the motivations of the speaker quickly and
effectively become even more important so that leads us back to the emoticon I've heard the complaints but they're not professional you can't use these are professional circumstances other things that we once considered professional or unprofessional have changed over time consider smoking in the workplace or women wearing pants to work at one point it was perfectly acceptable to smoke in the workplace and women wearing pants nearly
unthinkable now the view of each of these has flipped we're already seeing the effects of these changes in other aspects based on the changing demographics of the workforce did you know that millennials are now the largest segment of the workforce in just a few years they will constitute forty percent of the workforce by twenty twenty five millennials will be seventy five percent of the workforce these
are business people who grew up with smartphones in their hand and love to communicate with emoticons emoji is we're already seeing the effects of this in the perceived professionalism of social media and businesses using info graphics to display complicated information in a visual format recently a study was completed on the unit utilization of emoticons in negotiation it's well established but the ability to develop report isn't
key component to a successful negotiation the negotiating pairs who utilized emoticons were able to developer pour more quickly and were able to reach a resolution more quickly and those who did not use emoticons so emoticons can be used in a professional circumstance and may even be beneficial if used in the right way so this leads me back the platinum rule as we recognize our own communication
preferences and learn the perfect the preferences of those around us we will need to learn and adapt right now we may need the temporary use of emoticons at work because those at the top may not find it appropriate but in the future it will be different we will do business primarily with millennials we will elect politicians who communicate with one another and with the public more
electronic forms of communication we will negotiate huge business deals and maybe even peace treaties over email or text message all with people who grew up accustomed to this type of communication change is inevitable we need to embrace that changed we better communicators we cannot fear forward movement in the time that I've been on the stage there been more than fifteen million tweets all that communication is
bound to stir up conflict all conflict begins on an interpersonal level and sometimes it grows to a small group large group even national and international levels some of you may feel like this right now that's okay as we embrace the plan to rule we will have better communication and reduce conflicts this means that in our personal lives professional dealings and even in politics we're going to
