I read a joke in a popular crosswords magazine that goes something like this: an aged lady walks on a seaside and sees an aged painter splashing colors on a board.
She asks him what the splashes are meant to be and the painter answers that he has not the faintest, he does it just to spend his time.
The lady comments: “You are lucky; my husband is retired, too, and he spends all his days lying drunk.”
Without thinking of exaggerating some – negative – characteristics of our communication system(s), I would say that above both cases can equally apply. Either we do useless things or we get drunk, “just to spend our time”.
Alphonse Allais said that we kill time as if it were not time killing us.
COMMUNICATION RISKS
Our communication, whatever its means, has become far worse than redundant, thinking of systems redundancy as a means to reduce probability of system error or failure.
The very risk is that having redundant communication results in: “(a) surplus to requirements, unnecessary or superfluous; verbose or tautological; deprived of (its) job because it is no longer necessary.”
But nobody seems to care. Newspapers are baked more often than bread. TV nauseates us by repeating at tremendous frequency the same so called “news”, and spots.
We talk the same topics over and over, and – though we pretend to keep breathing fresh air – we suffer from communications hypoxia. Hypoxia generally is a condition in which the body or a region of the body is deprived of adequate oxygen supply.
The communications business is – as most businesses – self-sustaining. We pretend to meet our business’s customer requirements but, truly speaking, even when we trumpet that we work to quality, what really matters is that our business is really sustainable.
Serge Latouche has touched several times the archetypical theme of slow growth, or growth that is not primed artificially though government budgets.
When I read articles and books, see films and listen to music, I keep asking myself if Pareto would not be right even analyzing all this stuff specially ten percent is good to be saved and ninety percent can go down the drain.
It’s a shame: so many resources, so much good brains, so much time wasted just to make things that will only be looked at very superficially because their significant contents are very poor, almost nothing.
In times when we are all asked for commitment against terrorism; to protect the environment; to care for the poor, the Ill, the aged; to care for the newborn, it is at least surprising that no pledge is evident toward improvement of daily official communication.
It is just like what we say of ostriches. When we perceive bad things coming, we hide our heads in the ground.
If cyber-risks are knocking at our door, their coming into reality will surely mean severe disruptions to our life-styles and – maybe – lives.
But we must not keep ignoring that communication risks, although more subtle and less spoken-of, are at least as severe, if not more so because they bear much deeper into our subconscious thinking systems.
We run the risk to end up in an increasingly stale communication, that can obliterate the power and effectiveness of our feeling and thinking systems.
I read once that Italian managers are the EU’s most ignorant, because they are the ones who read the least.
I was shock at that time to read this. But nowadays having grown more analytical, I ask myself “is it really so?” What is there really worthwhile to read?
In an average italian newspaper, seventy percent of the paper is devoted to politics, twenty percent to soccer, the remaining ten percent to gossip, weather forecast, shows. And it’s like this every day, seven days a week, three-hundred-sixty-five (or -six) days a year.
And please don’t tell me that – apart from knowing who’s winning this or that election or game – there isn’t any real “news” to be read.
We should be committed to a huge effort to look for and find a new horizon for communications.
Even to the cost of being judged counter-current.
Weren’t we who first put our finger on quality and said that its era was gone?
Why shouldn’t we dare to say that communication as we know it is really gone?
Nature and life thrive on evolution. Why shouldn’t communication step aside and leave its place to something beyond it?