Online and in person: How the medium shapes the message

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1 Online and in person: How the medium shapes the message FROM THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT Commissioned by

2 Online and in person: How the medium shapes the message WRITTEN BY THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT In the business world, is the primary means of communication, with over 124 messages either sent or received by each user each day. As companies expand their operations to new markets and geographies, s appear to have become the entire foundation upon which organisational communication takes place. It is unfortunate, then, that is a format to which human beings are so poorly suited. Humans aren t evolved to read text and interact in cyberspace, says Dr. Rachael Jack, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. She explains that when we interact via , we lose a lot of rich information that we would otherwise receive when speaking face-to-face. The presence of this contextual information - be it gestures with the face or hands, or the tone of voice used (which, says Dr. Jack, is more important than the content of the message itself) - is in a sense reassuring to us, as it allows us to ascertain exactly what the other person means. In its absence, she says, we feel anxiety, which will tend to make [us] interpret things negatively. This is probably the reason why, when people send s, they can be interpreted as aggressive or critical. This problem is exacerbated by what, in a 2005 paper published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, has been described as egocentrism over - that is to say, the routine overconfidence that the recipient of our has clearly understood our meaning, based 2

3 on the fact that we cannot easily imagine a perspective different from our own. We see this contrast of perspectives at its sharpest when business is conducted across borders, between people from very different backgrounds and cultures. In 1976, Edward T.Hall, an anthropologist, drew a distinction between high-context and low-context cultures. In low-context cultures - typically those countries with Western European roots, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States - written messages tend to be far more direct and to the point, often without lengthy salutations. In high-context cultures - that is to say, most of the rest of the world - the sender of the written message tends to include more context and more personalised background content. For example, Americans might not give much thought to how they start and finish their s, whereas for Japanese people such salutations - and even the subject line - are extremely important. Bhaskar Pant, the managing director of professional education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, considers that these nuances are all the more crucial when people are not working face-to-face. You need to be particularly careful as to whether you are being terse, or brusque, or obtuse, he says. Yet the unfortunate trend, in Pant s view, is that people are becoming more careless in their written communications, not less so. This obliviousness, says Pant, takes on even bigger meaning when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, where joint ventures have actually fallen apart due to cross-cultural misunderstandings. 3

4 Pant points to the merger of Germany s Daimler and America s Chrysler as the leading example of this. He calls for far greater investment in training in this area, and recommends that companies with subsidiaries in different regions draft separate versions of the same messages for each group of recipients that is customised to resonate more effectively with their cultural sensitivities. Professor Frank Farley, a past president of the American Psychological Association, describes our era as the age of disinhibition : a time when, separated from the recipients of our messages by a computer screen, we are able to be more candid than we would normally be. There s an incredible amount of toxic communication going on throughout the world, he says, and so we shouldn t expect that business communications...are going to be immune to this. To reduce this toxicity in the business context, Farley suggests that, instead of , colleagues should use a mixture of video and text messaging to contact each other - a method analogous to Snapchat, the smartphone application that is particularly popular among young adults. Farley s sentiments are similar to those expressed by Dave Bowie, the founder and director of strategy at 1VirtualWorld. Bowie, whose company trains people to work effectively with each other even though they may live thousands of miles apart, believes that young people may have a large role to play in changing the way businesses communicate today. For one thing, he says, they are entirely comfortable with working remotely and having very limited personal interaction with their friend, family and colleagues. Another is that they are more needy than previous generations, in that - judging by the way they interact on social media - they require the visual affirmation of photographs and videos alongside written messages. Collectively, these components make them highly adept at using virtual tools to set contexts and personify the messages they are communicating, far more so than the generations before them. In 2020, 70 per cent of the workforce is going to be millenials, says Bowie, [and] 50 per cent are going to be freelancers. The landscape of how we communicate may thus be shifting, and more rapidly than we think, from the written word to the video chat. In the business world, the may still be king for some time to come, but it appears that there is much life in the faceto-face conversation yet. 4

5 Economist Intelligence Unit The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is the world s leading resource for economic and business research, forecasting, and analysis. It provides accurate and impartial intelligence to companies, government agencies, financial institutions and academic organizations around the globe, inspiring business leaders to act with confidence since While every effort has been taken to verify the accuracy of this information, The Economist Intelligence Unit Ltd. cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this report or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in this report. Copyright 2016 The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited. All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the Economist Group. Whilst every effort has been taken to verify the accuracy of information presented in this document, neither The Economist Group nor its affliates can accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this information. LONDON 20 Cabot Square London E14 4QW United Kingdom Tel: (44.20) Fax: (44.20) london@eiu.com NEW YORK 750 Third Avenue 5th Floor New York, NY 10017, US Tel: (1.212) Fax: (1.212) newyork@eiu.com HONG KONG 1301 Cityplaza Four 12 Taikoo Wan Road Taikoo Shing Hong Kong Tel: (852) Fax: (852) hongkong@eiu.com GENEVA Rue de l Athenee Geneva Switzerland Tel: (41) Fax: (41) geneva@eiu.com 5