The Hierarchy of Communication

Photo by Carrie Thomas

Recently I received a fan letter in the mail. Yes, people do still write letters. I was so excited by this. I have received fan-emails before, but never an honest to goodness letter that someone took the time to actually write. For some reason, the receipt of this little paper love nugget, brought me back to an earlier thought process I was having regarding levels of communication. There are many ways that we communicate with each other at the dawn of the digital age. I believe that different forms of communication hold different weight.

Just so we are clear, I have created a hierarchy of communication as I see it.

1. Personal face to face communication
2. Handwritten letter
3. Landline phone call
4. Cellphone call
5. Email
6. Instant message
7. Text Message
8. myspace message

In addition to the hierarchy, there is the lowering or raising of the communication bar.

If someone calls you on your cellphone and you respond with a myspace message, you have essentially dropped the status of communication by responding at a level that is lower on the scale and less connected.

If someone sends you a myspace message and you respond with a landline call, you have upped the bar of communication showing that you really want to connect on a higher level.

As, I sit writing a response to the recently received letter, I know there to be a great deal of truth to this. I would not respond to a handwritten letter with an email after someone took the time to carefully choose words and permanently press them to paper.

Though there are no hard rules or etiquette for communicating as the many ways in which we can do so keep rapidly changing, I do know that we are all becoming more an d more disconnected from each other. We walk through life in individual self-induced sensory deprivation chambers with headphones firmly attached, calloused thumbs sore from texting.

We shuffle from one machine to the next, plugged into a network where we feel we are able to communicate freely. Do not forget that a cellphone is a tracking device. We communicate through text messages and email and order everything online in a country where our government has openly admitted to illegally gathering information and spying on its own citizens for the greater good.

People disappeared in the middle of the night in the fall of 2001. Men in suits carried them away. We didn't discuss it. They were neighbors. We didn't know them that well. What happened to these people? I sat at a bar after a performance in 2005 speaking with a man who worked for the military and whose job it was to go through files and figure out who had been detained in Cuba for 4 years mistakenly in the frenzy surrounding 9-11. You don't hear about these people on the news. This isn't as important as why Britney Spears might have shaved all the hair off of her mis-shapen head. Something has gone terribly wrong.

So, I type these words in a free nation where communication is at its height.
If I am whisked away in the night, I hope there will be someone to take off their headphones, put down their cellphone and fight.