Mark Bauerlein complained at WSJ.com that “Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues.” It has something to do with all the time they spend, according to Nielson Mobile, sending and receiving an individual average of maybe 1,742 or 2,272 mobile text messages per month.
And what’s supposed to be bad about that? Bauerlein’s concern is that “much of our social and workplace lives run on” non-verbal communication, and if they spend all their time looking at iPhones instead of people in-the-flesh, they won’t be very good at projecting or picking up on the right cues.
Users insert smiley-faces into emails, but they don’t see each others’ actual faces. They read comments on Facebook, but they don’t “read” each others’ posture, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other nonverbal—and expressive—behaviors.
But then as soon as I read that I thought of Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy, in which he makes a case that new technologies and practices on the web — precisely the ones Bauerlein has criticized — are empowering autistic and neurodiverse individuals to be more social and productive.
Compare the last sentence from the Bauerlein quote with this, taken from the Wikipedia article on Asperger’s Syndrome (often described semi-incorrectly as “high-functioning” autism):
Individuals with AS experience difficulties in basic elements of social interaction, which may include a failure to develop friendships or to seek shared enjoyments or achievements with others (for example, showing others objects of interest), a lack of social or emotional reciprocity, and impaired nonverbal behaviors in areas such as eye contact, facial expression, posture, and gesture.
Cowen’s great insight (not necessarily original, e.g.) is that those characteristics are not absolute deficiencies, they are merely differences. Society just happens to have been skewed in ways that amplify the weaknesses of the autistic-style while providing few opportunities to cultivate autistic-style strengths.
That’s changing — and Bauerlein himself helps make the case.
To show how valuable non-verbal communication has been, he reached all the way back to 1959, citing anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s research on the importance of non-verbal communication for “imparting feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgments.”
But what makes “feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgements” so much more useful and important than ideas, observations, criticisms, analyses, insights, explanations, etc, which are often obscured by non-verbal communication?
Speaking for myself, I vastly prefer the latter set; I’ve spent most of my life fretting about how under-appreciated those are, relative to the former set I’m less suited to work with.
I’m pretty happy about the shift. I don’t know how anyone could be anything other than astonished by the way so many autistic-style characteristics are considered flaws: e.g. the tendency to be “too honest” or the tendency to “interpret things too literally.”
It seems ridiculous. My feeling is that if our society considers honesty and interpretive precision to be flaws, then it’s our society itself that’s in need of therapy.
And again Bauerlein seems to help make the case:
Hall explained, U.S. diplomats could enter a foreign country fully competent in the native language and yet still flounder from one miscommunication to another, having failed to decode the manners, gestures and subtle protocols that go along with words…
Should we have read that as he intended — to mean those diplomats needed to improve their non-verbal communication? Or could the problem be interpreted another way? I’m more inclined to read it as demonstrating a case for relying on less non-verbal communication in professional settings… i.e. Why isn’t the standard manner of diplomacy more straightforward, explicit, and unambiguous?
Finally, the fact that text messaging is so popular isn’t just arbitrary; it shows there are human capacities for different styles of communication that weren’t fully realized in the past.
After all, there must be some psycho-social-anthropological explanation for the rapid adoption of digital media… 2,272 text messages per month, per person, can’t all be written-off as incidences of stupidity.
One final point in passing: this being a blog post, not a book, I don’t have room to address very valid concerns about serious cases of low-functioning autism. That’s another matter — though no less of one — but one I’m much less capable of treating.
