- Re-Humanizing Communication Requires a Regular Practice of Slowing Down and Focusing
- Being Present with our Thoughts Allows Us to Remain Open to Vulnerability
- Regular Periods of Tech-Free Quiet Re-sets our Ability to Communicate with Meaning and Impact
In other articles I have written about my honors R-Humanizing Communication course I teach. This course focuses on technology’s impact on how we communicate and connect and its impact on vulnerability. I do several activities in the course that showcase the need for vulnerable experiences. For example, I assign my students to sit alone in their own thoughts without any technology present for a whopping 30 whole minutes. That’s 1,800 long seconds, and when I bring this up, I see expressions of panic.
I require them to just sit and think and let their minds wander. There’s no tech, no distractions, and no other people. They look at me like I’m a crazed dictator, but what’s revealed in eight years of teaching this class is that about 90% of my students say they cry or feel very emotional in this 30 minute eternity (this is not a bad thing). For many of them, they don’t know what they’re crying about. I tell them that it’s probably all the pent up emotions, good and bad, swirling around in their minds, which they’ve avoided feeling and processing.
They (nearly) all come back saying they are so glad they did the assignment, but admit it was uncomfortable, because they had to look within rather than allowing anything external to be their focus. They had to think about themselves, the people or experiences in their lives and the things that bother them. They had no technology to use as a distraction or form of avoidance.
They also report having realizations about other classes, projects, or about relationships. They talk about the experience jump-starting their creative juices. And many say that though they were anxious about having to sit in their own thoughts, by the end, they were feeling more relaxed and focused. This is not rocket science, I simply forced them to give themselves space and time to process, in a world that tells them there’s no time for this, or value in doing it.
We can all do this, and we need to. Some people may call it meditation, but it’s not, really. It’s just reducing the noise so we can hear what’s actually going on. What’s the first thing most people do when they’re driving and lost? We turn the radio down. We reduce the distractions so we can re-orient ourselves.
Another assignment I do is I ask them to identify the five most positively influential people in their lives up to that point. On a sad side note, I had to add the word positive to the assignment because it was easier for them to think of negative influences. That alone tells me we need to build positive relations intentionally. I instruct them to write a paragraph or two about why this person had such a positive influence on them, and after they turn it in, I give them all a 50% grade. I then tell them that they will earn a perfect score if they send these notes to the people they wrote about.
And guess what happens? They freak out. Their disbelief is written on their faces. They can’t fathom the idea of communicating about the wonderful impact someone has had on them. This creates a particularly heavy load of dissonance for these honor students, since they’ve never earned a failing grade on anything, and it seems I’m asking them to do the impossible: communicate their positive thoughts and feelings to and about someone who matters to them.
I give them the rest of the semester to send the notes, which is a lot of lead time to find a stamp, make a call or send an email. Remarkably, alarmingly and deeply dishearteningly, about half choose to take the F rather than communicate their positive feelings about someone. To my way of thinking, this epitomizes how far from real human connection we are and how deeply we need to focus on re-humanizing how we communicate.
What does this tell me, as an academic and expert in communication? Many of my students are not even willing to feel the good or positive feelings, share them and be vulnerable. During each class, I check to see if anyone sent their note, and I ask them to share with us how it felt, as well as the people’s responses. As you might imagine, I have yet to hear a negative response. Who among us would be displeased to hear that we’ve made someone else’s life better and more meaningful? The positive communication leads to more positive communication, increased vulnerability and a sincere sense of accomplishment, like an invisible wall of avoidance was removed. This simple communicative act created access to another person and allowed vulnerability to show.
This is a perfect point to remind you of why I fear for the Republic. We are even afraid of good things. But wait, it gets better.
When I teach this course, I also require my students to live phone-free for 48 hours. I tell them on day one: ‘you will have to do this and you will fail a major assignment if you don’t.’ I recommend they drop my course and choose a new class, if they’re not willing to participate in the phone detox assignment, because I think it’s that important.
Because I’m not a monster, I don’t do a complete tech detox. My students are allowed to use their computers, but I tell them no texting, messaging, or social media (it’s on the honor system and most actually honor that request).
Consistently, this has been the assignment that’s been the most eye opening for my students, and counterintuitively, it strengthens their ability to see the value of good communication in their lives.
Watching this scene at the beginning, one would think I’ve conscripted these students into something revolutionary and there are a lot of preparation steps that must take place before relinquishing the phone. Parents freak out. Everyone allows their mind to envision every possible emergency that could happen in that 48 hour time period. A mild version of panic sets in and my students feel pressure to over communicate that they won’t be able to communicate using their usual methods for two whole days.
Each student has to give their parents a friend’s number and tell them they can email them. They also have to think about how they’ll wake up, because their phones are also their alarm clocks. I ask them to tell all the important people in their lives what they’re doing, so no one thinks they died or are having a breakdown. This causes a lot of interesting and hateful responses about me from their friends and families. I’ve been called a crazy tyrant, a power tripping professor, a teacher who wants to make their students’ lives miserable, an instructor who is overstepping, and someone who must hate relationships. The funny part is, those responses themselves prove the point of the course. Once all the prep work is made, I take the 20 phones and lock them in a safe.
The students leave the class that day looking like lost, dejected puppies. They walk to the door glancing back at me with my bag of phones, either contemplating a counter attack or thinking ‘what have I done?’ All the students return to class after 48 hours saying they’re aware of how dependent they are on their phones, how they use them to hide from people and emotions, and taking responsibility for their terrible time management. They talk about how productive they were in those two days – one student said they did more in 48 hours than they do in two weeks, phone in hand. They talk about how they had more engaging conversations, pursued creative activities or hobbies they missed, and actually learned better.
The comments, however, that I think are most important are when they talk about how much calmer they were. They feel less stressed, more motivated, healthier, and sleep better. They also say they realized they forgot what birds chirping sounded like, since they usually have headphones on. They have a space to be alone with their thoughts and vulnerable with themselves and others. They experienced vulnerability when they had to ask someone what time it is or for directions. They allowed themselves to be more present, situationally aware and conscious because they were unplugged from a device and plugged into what was actually going on around them, in real life.
The students all come back saying they moved from dread to relief over the two days. They say they’re going to start regularly taking time to unplug, so they can re-center, re-humanize themselves and hear themselves think. Many students I see years later still tell me they’re unplugging daily for short periods of time because of this assignment, which proves the need for this re-set. It’s a trip to hear how they navigated finding directions to a store or coordinating meeting up with a friend and how they made sure they got everywhere on time, because beyond critical thinking, this involved intentional, thoughtful communication of the kind many of us did all day, before cell phones told us how to live.
To be clear, I know our phones aren’t responsible for how checked out we are. The real issue is how we’ve nearly all fallen into the habit of hiding behind them, as though the device is in charge of the human, rather than the other way around. This has done more to contribute to de-humanizing our experiences and communication than anything else in our environment. We were fine before we had them, and we will be better off today when we put them in their proper place, which is not at the center of literally everything we do. I challenge you to take a moment each day to simply unplug and just be.