Since my blog yesterday about what I’ve been reading, I’ve had a lot of interesting discussions about Joel Foner’s blog post How Tweeting About “My Stupid Breakfast” Creates A Lifestyle Of Continuous Learning.

People have talked about the importance of face to face communications, especially when providing therapy, and have spoken about examples of people being too closely wed to their cellphones, with and example of a New Year’s Eve party “where almost everyone was on the phone at midnight rather than holding hands and singing with each other”.

With that, I responded:

When I sent Joel's blog post, I thought it had some interesting new insights into communication and how the way we connect with one another online develops over time. I haven't seen much writing about developmental aspects of online communication and I thought it was noteworthy. If I had thought the post would have brought back the old false dichotomy for real/virtual which was significantly hashed out by social scientists in the 90s, I wouldn't have bothered sending it.

Other than perhaps folks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame or the Phantom of the Opera, I believe that most people desire face to face contact, and I do believe that when it comes to therapy, every effort should be made to make the therapy face to face.

Perhaps even more concerning is the focus on the utilitarian aspects of communications and the assertion that some forms of communication are a waste of time. I am sensitive on this aspect because I just spent the afternoon with my daughter visiting an exhibit of undergraduate art students, followed by a long shopping expedition at a local art supply store, before sending her on her way back to college where she is majoring in art. (It had been a double major in art and psychology, but she has dropped psychology back to just a minor so she can work on more art forms). I can think of so many young artists damaged by family pressures to do something more useful and I wonder about youth today being damaged by pressure to do something more useful than communicate online. But, I digress.

As I think about the responses here, including the observation of folks at the pub being on the phone at midnight instead of being more engaged with the people around them, I come back to the key idea that I appreciated out of Joel's blog post, a focus on the developmental aspects on online communication. Perhaps it is somewhat akin to developmental aspects of the artist. I remember the old adage, to a hammer, every solution looks like a nail. To my daughter, every solution looked like a painting, until she started throwing pots. Slowly, as an artist, she is developing and learning which media works best for which type of expression.

Perhaps, some of those in the pub are stuck in the early stage of online tool using where the solution to every social interaction looks like it should be mediated by a cellphone. Yet perhaps some have progressed beyond the early stages to a more integrated form of communication.

How then, might we use a more nuanced developmental understanding of online communication to better understand the people we are communicating with? Instead of railing against someone for being at an early developmental stage of online communication and encouraging them to stop communicating online, might we be better off understanding developmental stages of online communication and when we deal with people who are stuck in an early stage, help them to better integrate this new form of communication with other forms of communication?

As a follow up, one person asked me what I see as a 'more integrated form of communication'.

To that, I replied

I'm not absolutely sure, myself, what a more integrated form of communications might look like. Joel's blog post provides a good starting point for exploring the idea. Some people start off with their online tool using being very much about themselves, about what they ate for breakfast, but over time, he suggests it leads to people thinking about what is going on around them, researching what is going on around them, figuring out what makes sense in terms of social interaction, e.g. who do you tell what to, and so on.

It would seem that just tweeting about breakfast isn't a very advanced stage of online tool using. Perhaps spending precious moments at a pub as a New Year begins, isn't particularly advanced. It leads me to a few thoughts. First off, the person engaged in texting at New Years is perhaps not all that different than the stereotypical husband of previous generations with his face in the daily newspaper who fails to interact with his wife. Yet with either the newspaper of yesteryear, or the cellphone of today, it is possible to combine forms of communication. I can imagine a husband of yesteryear who has learned more about integrating forms of communication saying something like, "Hey honey, I just read this interesting article about Saigon. What do you think?" Likewise, I can see a youth with a cellphone at a pub yelling out, "Hey mates, my buddies in Spain are having a great time too, and wishing all of us a Happy New Year!"

Since much of my work is in the political realm, I can site examples from Connecticut State Politics. There was a picture displayed last session of some legislators playing solitaire while a long-winded politician rehashed his positions in a long speech. This, I would suggest is not a particularly advanced form on online tool using. Yes, it helps thwart tedium by killing time, (as if you could kill time without wounding eternity), but not much else. Other politicians I know have tweeted about what is going on in chambers and have had constituents tweet back facts that refute the opposition’s positions. These politicians have used this information in their arguments to bring about better legislation, and I'd suggest that this presents a more advanced stage of online tool using.

It may be that there are interesting parallels between levels of online tool use and emotional maturity. Much of the discussion these days is about youth not using online tools effectively or responsibly. Yet adolescence is a time of finding out who one is and how one relates to society around oneself. It should be surprising that youth might not always make the wisest choices about how to use online communication tools. This, I suspect, is compounded by adults that have not found out themselves how to most effectively use online communication tools, and thereby providing less than helpful comments about these tools.

I should note, that all of this is just typing off the top of my head, and like I said at the start, I'm not really sure what a more integrated form of communications might look like. However, I am sure that we would all be better off looking for it, working together to find it, than simply bewailing how much better things were before people could communicate other ways than just face-to-face.

Another person, who is on Twitter pondered about what it is appropriate to reveal online. This is a great old question and I responded

As to the idea of determining what is the appropriate level of public self-revelation that a person should do as part of their use of online tools, I think that is an extremely important, and interesting question. Most often, it is looked at in terms of youth posting pictures of themselves drinking on their Facebook pages. These days, it is also being looked at in terms of the practice of 'sexting'. It would seem that both of these practices are examples of a lack of understanding of the appropriate level of public self-revelation using online tools.

One person’s comments about his self-revelatory blog provide a good example exploring what it is and isn't appropriate to present online. To the extent that one is trying to help others be more open with their thoughts and feelings, modeling appropriate levels of openness online may be particularly important. As came up in previous discussions, many patients openly admit that they 'google' their therapists. So, it does seem important to think about.

Hopefully, others will find this interesting and will spend time thinking about understanding developmental stages of online communication. What are your thoughts? How do you understand developmental stages of online communication? How can educators, therapists, parents and others assist in better development on online communication skills?