Intro to the Communications Impact Ladder
The Medium is the Message
Let’s begin our exploration of the Communications Impact Ladder with a pop-culture phrase, one we’ve all heard a thousand times: We are what we eat. Seems innocent and unobjectionable enough…
If, however, we’re truly interested in the quality of our lives, we might be better served in the long run by the phrase: We are how we eat. Do we eat by ourselves on the run or in front of the TV, or do we make the effort and take the time to prepare and share a meal with others seated around the same table? Which does the better job of promoting and protecting our spiritual, social, emotional, and physical wellbeing: what or how?
Marshall McLuhan — the acknowledged father of modern media ecology, the study of how media systems affect our lives — asked essentially the same question as it applied to various media more than half a century ago. He concluded with the simple but impossibly profound observation that the medium is the message. In other words, the messages in the media content we consume (what we eat) are less important and less impactful on our lives than the inherit bias of the medium itself (how we eat).
The true message, therefore, is not in what we consume but in how we consume it. Turns out, for instance, that the news we consume on corporate TV is demonstrably less impactful on us than the fact that we’re consuming it on TV, where — because actual hard news is a perennial money loser — almost all of it is converted into something else before it reaches us, something far more profitable: entertainment. Sesame Street, per the brilliant observation of media ecologist Neil Postman, doesn’t teach kids their 123s and ABCs as much as it teaches them how to watch TV — for the rest of their lives.
Likewise, the text messages we send and receive on our smartphones are — in aggregate — less impactful on our lives than the fact that we send and receive them on our smartphones, devices designed not to empower us, as claimed, but to surveil and control our time, attention, and productivity. The apps on your smartphone are marketed and promoted as tools to help you personalize and manage your functional relationships with massive financial, travel, online retail, healthcare, and other institutions. The truth, however, is the precise opposite: the apps on your phone help the institutions they represent manage you. In the end, they don’t empower you; you empower them. You don’t control them; they control you. In the Huxwellian economy of the 21st century, you and your personal data — terabytes for each and every one of us — are the real products for sale.
The same medium-is-the-message dynamic extends to the individual messages and communications we share with others. What we communicate — in the long run — takes a backseat to how.
When viewed through the lens of media ecology in what I call the Great Age of Addiction — an age defined primarily by a state-sponsored meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital — it seems that there are sound ecological reasons for the deterioration of civil society and the institutions that once promoted and protected it. There seems to be a direct correlation between our descent down the Communications Impact Ladder and the quality of our lives. Simply stated, our journey down the Communications Impact Ladder in the 21st century is wrecking the joint for individuals, families, and communities alike. Meanwhile, the message from our new digital lords and masters is always the same: “Eat all you want,” they tell us. “We’ll make more.”
You’ll note from the above Communications Impact Ladder graphic that the various communications media we deploy most often in our day-to-day lives are grouped into two basic categories: synchronous in green at the top and asynchronous in red down below. Essentially, synchronous communications — like online chats*, phone calls, video calls, and face-to-face encounters — allow and require two or more parties to communicate at the same time. By contrast, asynchronous communications — like text messages, DMs, tweets, and emails — allow and require only one party to speak at a time. Consequently, synchronous communications are typically richer, more satisfying, and more demanding than their more barren asynchronous counterparts.
In the last two generations, with the sudden rise and dominance of digital devices and related services, we’ve witnessed a steady descent down the Communications Impact Ladder. Our descent accelerated wildly in the early 21st century with the confluence of state-sponsored default addiction and the institutional tyrannies of runaway digital scale. During that time our communication habits moved down the Communications Impact Ladder from near-exclusive reliance on synchronous media channels — like phone and face-to-face encounters —to their asynchronous counterparts.
Much of the downward slide on the Communications Impact Ladder can be attributed to the explosion of digital consumer devices in the early 21st century, as the first and second generations of digital productivity tools like laptops, tablets, and early mobile phones began their migration from our offices into our homes, rebranded en route as consumer gadgets…
Of course, as re-packaged office productivity tools our digital devices were never designed to enhance the quality of life in the first place. Indeed, the above graphic illustrates their true function: to vastly accelerate the volume of institutional communications while driving down the cost per communication. Unfortunately, the same basic office productivity tools that produced high-tech franchises with trillion-dollar market caps have proven largely ruinous to the quality of life outside the office in all ways: spiritually, socially, emotionally, and physically. The past two decades have witnessed…
an explosive increase in institutional relationships and asynchronous communications…
The sheer volume of institutional relationships in our personal lives increases dramatically as we descend the Communications Impact Ladder, and comes solely at the expense of our personal relationships.
the accelerated exchange of purpose and meaning for expedience…
Digital technologies accelerate our lives by increasing the number of friction-free communications and transactions. But the quality of our lives is largely reliant on and defined by the deliberate friction we create, on the moments when we intentionally slow down to smell the roses. As our lives accelerate to accommodate the sheer volume of asynchronous communications and institutional relationships in the 21st century, our ability to slow down long enough to engender deliberate friction is compromised, and the quality of our spiritual, social, emotional, and physical lives suffers. When we strip our lives and relationships of deliberate friction in pursuit of transactional expedience, we strip them of purpose and meaning. Worse yet, anything that threatens to slow us down — like faith, family, and community — becomes an enemy to be sacrificed to the false gods of expedience and quantity.the elimination of human interaction…
Synchronous communications with other humans simply consume far more money and time than their asynchronous counterparts — a truism for massive institutions and individuals alike. Accordingly, we are constantly incentivized to move our communications down the Communications Impact Ladder. In doing so, we live increasingly isolated lives. Over time our individual and collective auto-immune systems atrophy from spiritual neglect and loneliness in a direct inverse relationship: the more time and resources we devote to asynchronous communications, the lonelier and sicker we become.the demise of cognitive thought…
Synchronous communications demand far more cognitive thought than their asynchronous counterparts. As such, they demand more time, more resources, and richer sensory feedback than the asynchronous channels — and our 21st-century lives within them — can sustain. When the price of individual cognitive thought is too high we defer instead to the less demanding and more emotionally satisfying tribalism of limbic processing — precisely what the asynchronous channels promote. The trend is clear: We are losing our ability to formulate and communicate cognitive thought as we spend more and more time in emotional and tribal fealty on the bottom rungs of the Communications Impact Ladder.the loss of human narrative…
As the volume of meaningful social interactions in our lives decreases with each rung downward on the Communications Impact Ladder, the volume of non-verbal cues — the very things that contribute to the richness and impact of each encounter — likewise decreases. As the smiles and frowns and grins and grimaces of daily life disappear along with the timber and attack of our voices and gestures, we lose the narrative impact of our lives. Life becomes sterile, bereft of spirit and meaning — an endless series of emojis.increased intolerance and incivility…
By default, every synchronous communication requires a measure of tolerance and civility to initiate and sustain. Not so with asynchronous communications, where no other party — and certainly no opposing party — is even required to participate. Consequently, our tolerance for each other tends to decrease as we descend the Communications Impact Ladder. Our sudden eagerness to conflate speech with violence is but one measure of the intolerance and incivility engendered by the perilous descent from synchronous to asynchronous communications.The tyranny of lowered expectations…
A century or so before Marshall McLuhan said, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” Henry David Thoreau remarked, “We have become the tool of our tools.” Of course, neither thought offers much comfort as we stare down the 12-gauge barrel of artificial intelligence. Whereas our synchronous tools teach us to expect civility, tolerance, and human narratives tempered by measured thought and compassion, the inevitable expectation in the asynchronous basement of the Communications Impact Ladder is much simpler and far less demanding: Expect nothing.
To summarize: The descent into lifestyles supported and promoted by asynchronous media channels vastly amplifies our reliance on and fealty to institutional power, accelerates our day-to-day lives, erodes quality in the sacrifice of meaning and purpose for transactional expedience, isolates us and compromises our individual and collective auto-immune systems, elevates tribal emotion and raw power over reason and cognitive thought, strips away the power, grace, and nuance of human narrative, breeds intolerance and incivility, and teaches us all that expecting more from ourselves, our families, our communities, and our leaders is — by definition — racist, genocidal, and existentially at odds with our very survival.
Our digital lords and masters wouldn’t and likely won’t have it any other way. What they figured out at the turn of the 21st century is just now being exposed to the rest of us at large: Asynchronous communications sell abject excess while synchronous communications sell moderation. They understood with absolute certainty and more than a little self-satisfaction that the same digital tools of scale that weaken us as individuals, families, and communities champion and promote their institutional power in The Rise of Huxwell.
It’s time now to raise our expectations once again. Time to restore purpose and meaning and tolerance to the narrative of our lives. Time to step out of our self-imposed asynchronous prisons and reinvigorate our relationships with richness and texture. Time to restore civility and the gentle grace of nuance. Time to loosen the ironclad grip of institutions on our lives and futures. Time to move back up the Communications Impact Ladder.
Accordingly, the Communications Impact Ladder was designed to help satisfy two basic objectives:
quickly identify how you communicate with the people and institutions in your life, and
move you gently and gradually back up the Communications Impact Ladder in order to…
reduce the number, stridency, and impact of institutional communications — almost all of which are deleterious to the quality of your life, and are designed not to empower you, as claimed, but to better market and sell products and services you either already have, don’t want, or don’t need; and
improve the quality and satisfaction of your personal communications with the family, friends, and professionals who contribute to the quality of your life.
Buckle your seatbelt. It’s time to check out How to Use the Communication Impact Ladder, a simple step-by-step application guide for you, your family, and your community. Good luck!