When communication doesn't click

Sometimes, less is more ... especially in this age of over-sharing. Originally published in The Big Issue.

A good friend of mine was interstate years ago when she received a rare text message from her dad, a man of the land with no great love of mobile technology, or waffling on. His message read: “Sorry to report your horse died.”

A little on the blunt side, perhaps. But highly effective. Which is what modern communication is all about isn’t it? We want our information and we want it now. Except for when we suddenly decide we want our information a little less urgently and with a lot more sugar attached. 

There was a time when being the bearer of bad news involved gathering your thoughts along with your assorted stationery. It involved pondering and writing, pausing even, with actual pen and ink in hand.

It may seem outrageously antiquated nowadays, but the very act of sitting down to compose a reluctant letter meant we tended to say more rather than less. We meandered and waxed lyrical. We got all philosophical or religious or poetic. We hoped, by the end of it all, we might have softened the blow for the unfortunate recipient.     

Nothing’s changed on the bad news front, of course. We still have to dispatch messages we’d rather not have to dispatch. Only now, bad news travels with unseemly haste. We just click send. Good news goes at warp speed too, thankfully, but then good news has always been well suited to bustling brevity. “It’s a girl!” “The war is over!” “Your horse isn’t dead!” That sort of thing. Whereas the less cheery stuff has traditionally required more mollycoddling.    

Which is why bad news and instant messaging can be a cruel combination. All it takes is a few words to pop up without warning, unmitigated, on your screen and bang!

Message received all too loud and clear. Yes, it’s a sure-fire medium for no-nonsense communication. Yes, it suits our time-poor lifestyles. And all that. But it tends to lack the subtle charms of a handcrafted letter or a soothing voice down the line. Particularly for we namby-pamby types who still like to be let down gently.     

A classic example of this fast fading art is the Dear John letter; a suitably painstaking old-style way of saying what we mean to say, but in a roundabout fashion, taking as many detours as we possibly can before arriving back where we started, minus one companion. 

In the case of poor old proverbial John, he probably knew what was coming, yet still he consented to being led in circles, through page after page of flowery language and fond regrets. As torture goes, it’s exquisite. But surely not as brutal as a text message of ill tidings.

Just imagine. In the time it’s taken you to read this, a thousand or so young lovers the world over have written and sent a thousand or so Dear John letters via text message. “Dont h8 me but I met sum1 else.” Oh, the humanity. 

I won’t name names, but many of us remember well another version of the Dear John letter – the concise schoolyard edition, which squeezed the life out of young love with two words: “You’re dropped”, delivered not by the dropper themselves but by the dropper’s hatchet-faced friend, who couldn’t resist adding her own cruel embellishment: “And you’re a bad pasher”. Cruelty, brevity and verbosity in one instant message. Ouch.

The “you’re dropped” proclamation probably wasn’t the inspiration for social media, but it may as well have been. 

Thanks to our increasingly speedy technology, we are all hurriedly saying stuff we may or may not want to say to people who may or may not want to hear it. With one click, love can be lost. Deals undone. Enemies made. Friendships deleted. Sentences are going off half-cocked all over the globe and the first casualty isn’t truth. It’s old-fashioned tact. 

Maybe poor Dear John wasn’t so poor after all.