What Computers Can Teach Us About Communication

As I confessed in my last blog post, I am a geek. And part of my innate geekiness is the fact that I’ve always, secretly wanted to be a computer programmer. I cannot explain this desire, but it’s always been there.

I remember being ridiculously excited when I had to learn some (extremely) basic html in order to make a colleague’s job easier with a production piece that I wrote each week. I learned about hrefs and bolding and underlining. Even our computer guy thought my joy was weird.

More recently, I’ve been toying with PHP for a project I’m working on. It will hopefully become a successful side business that will provide me some wider latitude in choices I make.

Anyway, I discovered an extremely annoying thing about PHP … I can’t use contractions.

It’s the ‘ that gets in the way.

Yes, the single quotation mark.

Actually, I can use contractions if I lead the single quotation mark with a backslash: \. I figured this out through trial and error and much use of curse words invented by Twitter friends.

I know, I know, all of you who know better are sniggering at me for being such a newbie. Please allow me to remind you that you were once a newbie too. So there! 

Anyway, this exercise in frustration and creative cursing reminded me of a core truth about computers:

They Do Exactly What You Tell Them To; Nothing More, Nothing Less

This is not a criticism of the silicon beasties. It’s just a fact of their makeup. AI notwithstanding, they are incapable of doing anything outside of what they’re told to do.

Case in Point

Long ago and far away (read: the early 1960s), my father was a computer programmer.

(Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. By the time I was cogent of his profession, he’d moved into management.)

This was back in the days when “programming” meant setting a bazillion buttons and switches to, line-by-line punch holes in these rectangular cards. Each hole told the computer to do something very, very specific. It took days to code a single program. I mean days.

Well, on this particular day my father (these were the BC days: “Before Christy”) had just completed three days worth of coding work. The last step was to push the “Run” button. All of the company big wigs gathered to see the program run.

Yes, these were the days when people still gathered just to watch a computer compute.

For reasons that would make any capable UI designer want to commit suicide, this particular panel located the “Reset” button immediately adjacent to the “Run” button. 

Guess which one he pushed?

By mistake.

Oops!

Yup, completely by accident, my father reset three days worth of work. 

(Right now, I really want to go into a rant on UI design because it’s something I care a lot about, but I’m going to restrain myself. This time.)

Interestingly, he was not fired. He wasn’t even yelled at. This was just one of those things that sometimes happened in the early days. 

And it happened because computers do exactly what you tell them to do; nothing more, nothing less.

How this Relates to Communication

Computers are, in many ways, the purest form of Communication Theory in practice. 

There is a sender.

There is a receiver.

There is a message.

Interference and personal “stuff” do not enter into the equation. There is no need for interpretation, for there is nothing to be interpreted.

I am not suggesting that we all become dispassionate automaton, incapable of nuance and individuality. Not in the least. I just think there’s something to be learned here.

When a PHP-based program rejects my contractions because of that blasted single quotation mark (sans backslash), it’s not trying to figure out what I’m trying to say; it’s reacting to what I actually said. 

This requires that I work intentionally and carefully to communicate clearly with the program, making sure to insert that \ whenever I want to contract two words into one.

What if we did that with those with whom we communicate?

What if, just as an experiment, instead of trying to dissect and reframe and interpret what’s being communicated to us, we just took it at face value? Took the words (presuming that sarcasm and irony are not the core of the message), looked at them for what they are and just go with it?

I have no doubt that it’ll create some confusion. It’ll call upon the sender to communicate more clearly with you, because you won’t otherwise understand. It’ll call upon you as the receiver to set aside your “stuff” and quit laying your own “stuff” on top of what might be a perfectly innocent communication.

This destufficiation of communication might be refreshing.

And if you’re the sender of the message, this calls for you to make sure that you’re verbalizing (or writing) exactly what it is that you mean to communicate. In other words, you don’t expect your receiver to read between the lines to discover what you really mean to say.

Just come out and say it already!

Let’s try it. Anyone willing to brave this trial, please report your results in the comments. I really want to know if I’m being crazy, or if this could help us all a bit.

PS: If this makes no sense whatsoever, I’m blaming the fact that my SBH has given me the flu. I am feverish, therefore I might come off as nuts. I’m just sayin’.