The ugly truth about face to face communication

Face to face communication. Its both of a mix of love and hate. Truth to be told, face to face communication is going to be less of a competent cognitive ability when technology is replacing the people we do not need to communicate anymore. You have simple taxes to fill out? Software vendors exist to fill you that out. You want to buy something on a store? You can do the same thing online.

From the times societies became more advanced and filled with multiple layers of abstractions, people were creating conclusions based on mercy mental networks out of people's statements instead of mercy mental networks out of nature and cause and effect. This was an inevitable thing to happen given the time constraints of the individual and the complexity of our environment had to become in order to meet the different needs of millions of people. But it has gone to the point that specialization went too far on places that is too inappropriate to apply on every situation we encounter, as discussed in my blog post do you believe what other say? . But given that was not more than enough, we have another problem that instead of our point of contact being filled with mercy mental networks of people, we are being filled with mental networks of computer artifacts. Computer artifacts try to assemble the same needs of services you would need as you would interact with an individual. The problem lies that we associate or have expectations that human individuals should behave like computer artifacts because as we associate most of our time on computer artifacts, we expect that computer artifacts is the absolute truth.

Because computer artifacts has become the de facto currency of serving all the needs in the world (as you can see, the stock market, is distributing more and more of its main assets to be services that are rendered by computer artifacts that are more involved with our lives), it has become more apparent and obvious that we want services that behave in the manner of computer artifacts, and because of that supply, the demand will meet those services in the expected desire the supply wants. In other words, jobs will behave in a manner computer artifacts behave. And it is no wonder on how structured, organized, and habitual the process of all customer service is on these days. Over 20 years we haven't changed the process much  as ms-dos outputting "syntax error" to the user, besides that the conversation is more subtle, yet still methodological. There are a million articles describing this. A good example is how fast foods try to sell the same product prototype (and hence the invention of franchisees) everywhere you see the same brand name so you get the same expectations. And here is quite the same, but in a global scale. It is about our services everywhere to be the same. As we interact more than half of our time with computer artifacts, why spend the other time, especially on non-essential stuff, on human drones that have their own opinion and buzz words you never want to go through for a petty thing that needs not much thinking.

And most of the support of this movement is we are eliminating non-essential tasks so we can focus more on essential tasks. After all, isn't education the whole mission or purpose? It is not really about getting a stable job, but more like a lottery store sponsored by our culture and maybe the people who simulated this world (with churches) hoping one could integrate that Contributor intellectual thought into physical reality. Not all can be a leader of such mission, but add up that your colleagues learned the same thing as you did, and then you will see support while understanding your main goals as objectives. And for those who really understand the mission of all those institutions, they will not only give back, but be adversarial on putting those infrastructures on the right path. After all, our efforts is not only us as individuals on giving, but teaching others about it in order to amplify the effect, as the system design for improving the foundations is to work and collaborate as a cohesive unit.

But the point is are we really focusing on essential tasks or are we focused on eliminating tasks that are not-essential too much that we forgot what is really essential or not? And that is the wormhole we are ending up as a dead end. It is not bad to eliminate man-hours for people to focus from non-essential tasks to essential tasks. It is not bad to use same resources to produce services that scale up 100 times to before. They are important. They are need it. But distribute it wisely to the time we spend on focusing essential tasks to the time we remove non-essential tasks and then we get something that does not make sense to live in this world.

Let me point out one thing: One of the thing is that we have removed a lot of non-essential stuff that were redundant to simplistic and effective that reduces the amount of man-hours to render the service (external needs). Marriages, work labor, distribution of merchandises and entertainment has changed dramatically in the way they were provided over the past decade, especially within the last years, it has scaled up to the whole world.

We do have million or billion businesses and main markets of the stock exchange that build external content to our world, but do we have the same thing for the internal content of the world? Do people have powerful meaning in their workplace that compromises more than half of their daily active time of their life? When the supply dictates that their services be rendered in a computer artifact way? It is no wonder that the demand of the workforce needs employees that affiliate themselves to work in a computer artifact way as that is what the supply wants. Or in the other case, we have to think and work in ways to produce computer artifacts and be in their shoes most of the time. This does not sound a bad prospect, after all, like I said, it is need it. But not the point where we have to put 100% effort on it. It seems that these days that is the vision for all things considered. And given to what you see is what you believe, there is the opinion that we humans are no different than computer artifacts, with the only difference that we have a more higher level of complexity. And in some sense I do agree that all means of behavior and experience comes through a mechanical level or filter before it becomes an output. However, I think this it is too wrong to say as our whole definite life is based on that experience, when face to face communication expresses individuality that many try to anecdote it as an illusion of the mind confabulating itself.

Can we quantify what essential stuff we did to our world? And to say the least, we do not. What we can only say is how we allocate those resources more effectively or more efficiently to scale up to more numbers of individuals. And that is totally good. I would love to see more poor countries get services that they deserve if we have the capacity too. For developed nations get more needs of what they actually wanted more affordable and less time consuming. However, the content, the needs, haven't changed much these days. And if it did, not by that much, not a main component on the workforce, which cripples the whole point of eliminating non-essential tasks for essential tasks when you have no time for improving essential tasks. Essential tasks are discovered a lot of times through Research And Development. For example, eat more healthy fruits and salads in order to be healthy. This did some impact in the supply and demand. Some people figured out that was important because of some credible sources. Then chains of healthy food came up that scaled up very quickly like popular traditional fast foods. But the problem is they only reacted to that cause some credible source said based on research and evidence. If it wasn't for that, the purchasing power would not have left an open space for the demand to provide that. Unfortunately, this is limited to the health system, and must be expanded on other topics we individual can grow other than just keeping our bodies healthy. Mentally speaking, people are so good talking about their job and skills, but compared to the meaning and goals of their personal life is unorganized or comparably inferior to how organized their job skills are. Its missing the whole point of what life is really about.

As you can see, demand is like a blind sheep goat. Only analyzing markets, not changing markets that are more appropriate or correct, and then trying to provide that type of service with the same resources at a cheaper price with production scaling up compared to others. And worse of all, once that goal is set, expectations are hard to change, or else trust is lost. In such way, there will always be aggressive marketing to mesmerize that market demand once you are on it due too much investments were spent on attaining the domain knowledge and customized infrastructure for that need. Add up that most people work in that market as their mission or duty to perform and you can see that they will not have enough space to think how to improve the internal content of me.

In fact, societies have ignored the internal or subjective self of the individual so much these days that no purchasing power involves in changing in scientific way our internal world in the same way we do for our external world because we are mesmerized too much on optimizing our external world every day that there is no other market (and definitely that is what the stock market shows) other than this one. Ethics, philosophy, art, and building better communities without external hints to guide them to the correct path, not exploiting others and ability to have a big picture are stuff that people do not think, act or talk in part of their daily life of the workforce. And if that is not essential, then what is essential when you try to make better your own world itself by obliterating all your non-essential tasks to a greater degree, when ironically, you spend so much time on it, that you forgot the main purpose it was meant for. But I do not blame people, I blame the system's current flow and people not being aware of it because they are mesmerized only on what they see instead of what other possibilities this world could exist. And although I cannot doubt that a lot of people have a rich vocabulary and discussion about internal content, there is no demand or space to develop that internal content daily on the workforce, and without practice, there is no trip for anyone to explore where that rabbit hole it can lead us to.

And now, it is easy for me, after discussing all the above, the ugly truth about face to face communication. Face to face communication is not much the same and developed even for me or for others as it did for a hundred years it existed. Our potential is more on the software that we have not yet discovered the limits of what we can expand to compared to looking how our hardware is integrated. And most of our advancements was not because we evolved physically as that wasn't the main reason we expanded the world in unprecedented realms no animal kingdom could have imagined. Instead, we increased mentally to transform the world in to new heights. Now our face to face communication is replaced our face being communicated with a computer artifact instead of a real human being. The differences may look subtle, but they are big. Our expectations will soon come to an end that computer artifacts are the same as humans, not because that is the truth, but because at that flow of pace we will lack more and more internal content on developing ourselves to prove otherwise we are different.

Face to face communication is not face to face communication anymore. Its not that effective anymore as it did before. That is why I stray away from face to face communication most of the time because it is a poorly developed skill these days that is mostly used for public relations (hint hint, to influence, not to make real dialogue). People get very sensitive these days when communicated face to face as our culture has made us weak on our internal content to support ourselves and understand the situations we face when we talk.

Play the game of face to face communication and you play the game of authority. The reason I like other communications that do not involve face to face communication is neutrality and getting the right and correct things instead of misunderstandings and wrong decisions due to influence. People who communicate a lot face to face and use that communication too much over other things must already have realized the following: It is more effective to get things on what you want. There is the power of influence. A person pops up in front of your face. A mental network activates, a trigger. Your words and message becomes different, your level of confidence lowers, and you make mistakes and you are not at your best. Sometimes it is the other way around. People expect when talking face to face that they are absolutely correct when factual evidence states that it is wrong. It may be more easier if they read that on paper rather than telling them in person directly that they are wrong because the correct action is to think about evaluating things instead of having to get a final conclusion and wrap it all up on an environment where Perceiver thought is crippled over biases and generalizations of the triggers we get when we look at the faces of other people. It hurts mental networks to be that way, but as long as you are kind with your words and actions, it won't be so brutal.

In that sense, I do accept face to face communication being vital, but not as the only component, more as a hybrid model, to use it when it really makes sense, and at the same time, talk effectively. I want people to explore nature and cause and effect than trusting what others people say. I want people to gain neutrality and not authority when doing discussions on evaluating the truth. And the best way to do that is to avoid the triggers or the temptations that evoke those triggers to say the least while dismantling those reactions on those triggers (However, that is too hard, as nobody practices to understand the internal content of life. Only the external content is how most people view their life as). And I am all in favor to talk people face to face, but only when it is need it, talk effectively, and understand internal content, which is kind of rare, and only few would have conceptualized that trait through their experiences.

There are more elaborations that need to be addressed as to what is the difference with ourselves and a computer artifact, and so on. But one thing for sure, we can always get more closer to that and thousand of other things on improving our internal content of ourselves in the same way we expanded incrementally our external content of our world. All it needs for the world is to take a more bold step on that road within those matters.