1.1 Communicating in the Digital Age
Learning Objectives
After studying this unit, you will be able to
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- distinguish between personal and professional uses of communication technologies in ways that ensure career success and personal health
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Introduction
Honestly, how many texts or instant messages do you send in a day? How many emails? Do you prefer communicating by text, instant message app (e.g., SnapChat), or generally online instead of face-to-face in person with businesses? If you’re an average millennial sending out and receiving more than the 2013 average of 128 texts per day (Burke, 2016), that’s a lot of reading and responding quickly in writing—so much more than people your age were doing 20 years ago. Even if just for social reasons, you are probably writing more than most people in your demographic have at any point in human history. This is mostly an advantage because it gives you a baseline comfort with the writing process, even if the quality of that writing probably isn’t quite where it should be if you were doing it for professional reasons.
Where being overly comfortable with texting becomes a disadvantage, however, is when it is used as a way of avoiding the in-person, face-to-face communication that is vital to the routine functioning of any organization. As uncomfortable as it may sometimes be, especially for teens in their “awkward years,” developing conversational skills throughout that decade is hugely important by the time they enter a workforce mostly populated by older generations that grew up without smartphones, developed those advanced conversational skills the hard way by making mistakes and learning from them, and expect well-developed conversational skills of younger generations entering the workforce. Though plenty of business is done online these days, there really is no good substitute for face-to-face interaction.
According to Twilio’s 2016 consumer report on messaging, however, the most preferred channel for customer service among 18-24 year olds (said 31% of respondents) is by text or instant messaging, followed closely by email.[1] Face-to-face interaction, however, is preferred by only 6% of respondents.
| Messaging | Telephone | Face to Face | Other | Web Live Chat | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18-24 years | 31% | 29% | 23% | 6% | 4% | 4% | 2% |
| 25-34 years | 32% | 32% | 21% | 4% | 5% | 5% | 2% |
| 35-44 years | 31% | 30% | 26% | 4% | 4% | 4% | 1% |
| 45 – 54 years | 24% | 31% | 32% | 5% | 2% | 5% | 2% |
| 55+ years | 24% | 33% | 30% | 8% | 1% | 2% | 1% |
Figure 1.1.1: Preferred customer service channel by age group . Credit: Twilio. (2016). Understand how consumers use messaging: Global mobile messaging consumer report 2016.
Customer service aside, face-to-face interactions are still vitally important to the functioning of any organization. In a study on the effectiveness of in-person requests for donations versus requests by email, for instance, the in-person approach was found to be