Changing communication practices: How do we move from the old world to the digital epoch?

Disrupt, disrupting, disruptive, disrupted. The various derivatives of the root word "disrupt" paired with "economy" or "innovation"are probably one of the most searchable terms in Google's search engine these days. This shouldn't come as a surprise because it is an apt label to describe how our world has been draconianly re-arranged due to the pandemic / endemic reality that we are all living in.

But, what exactly is being / has been disrupted? In the world of business, this is probably easy to answer. We either enlarge our real estate to include digital assets or touchpoints (e.g., businesses actively adopting an omnichannel approach in their business models) or we literally move our homebases (e.g., giving up physical offices for WFH work policies) to be completely digitized in the way we do business.

The reality is that we are all on a trajectory in the transitory space moving (some more resistant than the others) towards some form of accepting an increased digital footprint in our lives. At some point - hopefully, not in my lifetime -this digital transformation will be complete. In the meantime, we are still sojourners in this transitory space. This means that we need to negotiate practices in both the established (old world) and the emergent (new world) for a simple reason: stay relevant.

This is the same in the domain of communication. We have all adapted to using a combination of physical and online communication modes to stay connected. Yet, just like new processes need to be drawn up when businesses co-opt digital innovations into their business models, there're different contextual factors that we need to consider when we shift from one communication mode to another.

For instance in f2f communication, we have probably heard of the classical 7 38 55 Rule of Communication or the Mehrabian Communication Theory that indicates the significance of non-verbal cues (or body language) in impression management. In short, 55% of what we don't say (e.g., facial expressions, touch, movements, gestures) constitutes the real message that we communicate. That's significant. But that can't be true in today's context when we are either masked up during physical engagements or are "restrained" by a digital filter (screen) during online engagements, no?

Separately, the way we write these days has also been significantly influenced by what I call social media post mentality. Out goes grammatically sensible sentences together with all forms of literary tropes; in comes gif, tiktok, foodporn, downloaded audio-visual greetings, urban slangs, emoticons and lots of !!!. But this surely wouldn't be acceptable in more formal writing such as White Papers, professional proposals and even more thoughtful journalistic opinion pieces, no? Of course, we may not always be called to write more formal pieces. But when we have to do so, the question is whether we know how to make the transition to communicate more formally. And yes, this has to work both ways.

In a nutshell, in order to stay relevant in this transitory space, we need to know how to shift from one communicative context to the next. So, in the next two weeks, I'll be sharing practical tips in adjusting the way we communicate in a series "Communicate relevantly: Go ahead and hack!":

• Up, close and personal: Hacking digital affordances to engage intentionally

• Same topic, different genres: Hacking communicative tools to write purposefully

If you've read this far, you are truly loyal (or bored). Stay tuned and I promise to share practical insights that my collaborators and I have observed as seasoned practitioners in the space of communication.

Writer

Dr. Katy Kan, wears many hats and is a partner with AGILIT Consultancy LLP. If you’d like to find out more about all things communication, do drop her a line at katykan@agilitconsultancy.com.sg