On Topic: Connectivity

So I went into the dry cleaner's not long ago to pick up some shirts my wife kindly had dropped off for me earlier in the week.

I knew the shirts would be under her name. As Lisa has a different last name than mine, I gave that name to the clerk.

“Ferlisa?” the clerk asked.

Now, I assumed we'd stumbled onto a second potential point of confusion: My wife, being from the Deep South, actually isn't named Lisa, but Melisa. And even though I'm just about the only person in America who calls her that, sometimes - just to make things interesting, I assume - she uses her real first name.

So I figured she'd done so here, and I replied, “No, Lisa. Or Melisa.”

The clerk looked up and repeated, “Ferlisa?”

“No, Melisa.”

“Do you want me to change it?”

“No, it's just a Southern thing. What I really want are my shirts.”

“But Ferlisa …?”

It wasn't until the next day, when I heard myself telling this story, that I actually understood where and why our attempt at communication had veered wildly off track.

Communication, of course, is what connectivity - this week's Business 380 theme - is all about. Telephones, the Internet, email, Skype, IMs and social media are means for conveying information, narrowly or across a broad spectrum.

With the tools we've developed, we can order a book from France with the click of a button or watch streaming video of a government being overthrown half a world away.

We can leave wiseguy comments on a friend's Facebook or Google+ page displaying her 132 vacation photos from Paducah, Kentucky, or find an up-to-the-minute stock price - then almost as quickly sell our shares.

Indeed, there's an entire generation that knows no other world.

I admit I use all those things - Facebook, Twitter, email, high-speed cable. I've watched soccer games on my home computer shown live from Barcelona and Amsterdam.

When I worked in Chicago and my wife remained in Michigan to sell our house, we Skyped almost every evening. It was a wonderful thing.

Sometimes Lisa would have unannounced “guests” positioned in front of her screen, so when my Skype window opened, there they'd be, smiling - surprise! Like watching Craig Ferguson.

The benefits to business small and large are almost innumerable, with the speed, accuracy and quantity of information that can been shared.

But, still, for all the speed, all the access and opportunity, it still seems we lose a tiny bit of our humanity.

I realize there's no stuffing the genie back in the bottle, and I'm in no way suggesting we should.

But let me ask you this: How many times a day do you choose to send an email rather than pick up the telephone or walk down the hall?

Then, after that initial email and its subsequent reply, do you need to send a follow-up message clarifying some point? Then a third email to confirm, yes, that is what you meant in the first place …?

At one magazine job, a late-20-something editor would email me several times a day - even though he sat directly behind me, in the very same cubicle. It drove me crazy.

What we lose with all this once-removed communicating is the human factor. No facial expressions, no shrugs of the shoulder - all those things that more often than not can enable better understanding.

Or, put another way, our tools are no better than we are.

Mark Twain wrote a very dizzy short satire in 1880 on the early use of telephones, “A Telephonic Conversation,” in which neither side fully comprehends what the other wants to convey.

During the muddled discussion, one person remarks that “I'm afraid I'm keeping you from your affairs.”

The other person, not completely hearing, asks, “Visitors?”

“No,” the first person replies, “we never use butter on them.”

Here's a more contemporary example of what I mean: A friend of mine makes her living as a professional photographer, and most of her posse also are photographers, with varying skill levels.

Once, when one of her acquaintances announced proudly he'd just spent an eye-popping amount of money on a top-of-the-line Hasselblad camera system, my friend leaned over to me and whispered, not all that softly, “It won't make him a better photographer. His pictures will still be awful.”

“Awful” isn't the word she used, but you get the general drift.

Smarter tech doesn't make us better communicators. It's all in how we use the tools.