For what it’s worth

By Jim Studer

When I taught in Maple Lake one of my quarter classes was Interpersonal Communication. When I was at St. Anthony Village High School a third of a required speech communication class I taught for 17 years was interpersonal communication. Interpersonal means one to one, person to person, face to face, ear to ear, among friends, family, coworkers, customers….

Interpersonal skills seem to have no place in today’s world. Personal is being replaced by email, text messaging and robo calls. If I want to contact a phone company, electric company or a dozen other such enterprises, I end up battling a machine that bounces me from one robotic voice to another only to be placed on hold for 5, 10, 15… minutes. Then I’ll be asked by a machine that accepts only yes or no answers or a choice of 1 to 5 options that usually do not apply to my specific inquiry. I truly believe the purpose is to encourage me to give up.

Email (which I don’t have), text messaging (which I only have in one direction but lack decoding skills; thankfully, I don’t know how to send one) are impersonal. They lack voice, emotion, and soul. They are sterile. I will concede that for businesses to send a factual message these methods may be expedient. However, such a business as the telephone company or cable company will not allow me to discontinue or change my service with just one phone message. To accomplish this I need to endlessly punch more buttons that can be found on an accordion. Then I am likely to end up speaking with someone in another country.

Today at social gatherings I see so many guests sitting around with a phone on a lap surfing the net, texting, or playing electronic games against an impersonal machine. The pleasure and art of conversation are now entering hospice.

Perhaps work from home will become a party from home; Oktoberfest, birthday, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve parties will be conducted alone in front of a computer or cell phone with an accompanying bottle of Captain Morgan or Jose Cuervo.

This impersonal lack of communication is being encouraged. Recently the Minneapolis Star Tribune via the Washington Post featured an article on the new telephone etiquette. Emily Post will know she is dead and gone to hell when she reads it. A few of the new rules are:

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