Can communication break down?

Well, that depends on your definition of a breakdown.

In high school, I had the incredible opportunity to spend four years developing not only my acting skills, but also my public speaking skills. I was a part of my school’s award-winning speech and debate team, which is a prestigious honor that I don’t think many people outside of the program can have a true understanding of. We practiced every day, made friends along the way, and worked with coaches who spent more time than you can possibly know honing our skills and making us into not only great performers, but great people, as well.

Our head coach was not just our coach, he was also our teacher. The speech team spent third period each day in the theater, where our minds were challenged in ways that our other classes could not compare to. Our coach told us that he wanted to make us smart, worldly people, that he wanted us to be able to ask questions and learn things that we could honestly use in the real world, and hold onto for the rest of our lives.

One particular lesson stays in my mind even now. Near the end of my senior year, we had an entire unit on communication. We walked into the room that morning to find five questions written on the blackboard, questions that only required a simple yes or no answer, but that led to an entire week of in-class discussions and analyses.

Question #3 was as follows: Can communication break down?

You would be surprised at how much controversy this question created.

According to the original author of this question, no, communication cannot break down; it merely changes. Our teacher agreed with this assessment, explaining that even what we deem ‘no’ communication is still saying something. For instance, when you ignore someone, you are communicating to them that you do not wish to talk.

When I saw this question, my mind didn’t even hesitate to conjure what I believed was the correct answer, which is that yes, communication can break down; in fact, I vividly remember thinking in the same breath that we are in the midst of a mass breakdown of communication at this very moment.

In my opinion, this question was misleading.

Communication cannot be completely eradicated. However, it can most certainly deteriorate, which I believe is occurring now as a result of the habits of our generation. Allow me to elaborate.

When a car breaks down, it still exists; there is just something wrong with it that is causing it to malfunction. Similarly, the communication skills of many millennials have either been broken, or lay dormant, waiting to be brought to the surface. The potential for good communication is still there, it still exists, but it is not working properly.

Before we discuss the cause of this problem, let’s first delve into the importance of communication, so that we may appreciate the severity of what we’re up against. We are constantly communicating with the world around us; when we speak, when we write, when we respond, even the way we carry ourselves, directly reflects the ways in which we are allowing the world around us to affect us.

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which communication does not exist. Can you even do it? In my opinion, such a world would hold no meaning. Human beings are creatures that crave interaction with the environment, and with other humans, so for no such interaction to occur would completely destroy our image of what it means to be alive.

So, why is it that I feel we are losing our ability to communicate effectively? It would be easy to blame the leaps and bounds we’ve made technologically over the past decades; keeping our eyes glued to a screen is one sure-fire way to begin retiring our people-skills, so to speak. But people themselves are the problem.

Guns don’t kill people. They are tools. People kill people. In the same way, technology is not trying to break down our ability to interact with others off-screen. But people are allowing themselves to become trapped in that web of electronics that is slowly lessening the communication skills that should be dominant in our culture.

For example, one huge irony that many people do not know about me is how uncomfortable I am talking to people on the phone. Here I am, a former speech competitor, speech captain even, who made more phone calls for the sake of the team than I even care to remember, and each time I picked up the phone, I felt nervous. It seems silly, doesn’t it? I don’t bat an eye when I stand in front of a room full of spectators and judges to perform for ten minutes, but give me a thirty second phone call, and you’ve stumped me?

As it turns out, I am not alone in this. The more I have spoken to other young people, the more I have discovered that a live conversation over the phone is something that causes anxiety for many of them. Even something as simple as ordering pizza gets handed off from person to person until someone swallows their courage and dials the number.

Instead of phone calls, we prefer texting. Instead of meetings in person, we prefer email. And our world is catering to this. Restaurants have developed online ordering. Last semester, I took an entire class online, whereby all of our lectures and quizzes and assignments were on-screen. And in some ways, this makes sense; time is saved, and that’s what is most important, is it not?

Well, not exactly.

If you were given two paths to the same destination, and one was an obvious shortcut, which would you choose? I am sure the universal answer would be to take the shortcut, due to the fact that it leads to the same place, so what’s the difference?

The difference is, the shortcut makes us lazy.

If we take the long path, the one that might not be as easy, the one that takes more time, not only will we build more muscle and a thicker skin along the way, we will also have a much higher appreciation when at last we reach our endpoint. The shortcut might be convenient, but it also takes away from our life experience, and to be honest, we learn less.

The point of this entire analogy is to make it understood that faster is not always better. If we want to improve our communication skills once more, so that we may embrace the world around us and all it has to offer, then we have to take action. Instead of blasting an iMessage, why not make that phone call? Go with the flow of the conversation, enjoy the immediate back and forth dynamic, revel in the knowledge that you are talking to a live human being, not a pre-programmed Siri. To take the easy way out is a hindrance that our generation cannot afford.

Before we know it, human interaction will cease to exist. As it is, the youth of today begins a courtship by ‘talking’, but it really isn’t talking at all. It is a series of back and forth text messages that feature more symbols and emojis than actual words. Is this a precursor for what our future holds if we continue to allow our communication to break down?

Yes, it is.

The more we allow this world to cater to our desire for shortcuts, the less our lives will come to mean. Before we know it, life is going to be nothing more than a series of tips and tricks to get to death more quickly. Because death is our endpoint. And why would we want to reach that end more quickly? It is not about the destination, it is truly about the journey. And that journey is about making connections with people, it is about impacting the lives of others, it is about not just surviving, but living. And good communication is that first step.

So now, I am changing Question #3 into a statement.

Yes. Communication can break down.

The question is: what are we going to do about it?