Is communicating in person the “gold standard”? You’re asking the wrong question

Communication has been described as the “<a href="https://medium.com/@periwynkle/forget-data-science-we-need-communication-science-f139247a5f6a" rel="noopener">most important skill of the 21st century</a>”. Yet myths circulate about what counts as ‘good’ communication, including what counts as the optimal circumstances for communicating. Myths arise partly because research in psychology and related disciplines rarely investigates <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5434514/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">naturally-occurring and moment-to-moment </a>communication, preferring to explore how people communicate in the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01074-z" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">laboratory</a> or <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26151975/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">report their communication retrospectively</a> in surveys. Additionally, the fact that we all communicate means it can be easy to find anecdata from our own lives to support or challenge what someone else says about how communication works — which may be correct for them but not actually generalizable. One assumption that is often shared by the public and researchers alike is that communication ‘in person’ is the ‘gold standard’ by which all other modes are judged. The current era of research on mediated communication still takes its primary cue from 1970s social psychological research, which judged communication modalities by ‘richness’. For instance, ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_presence_theory" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">social presence theory</a>’ proposed that in-person communication is best because it involves all five senses in real time without mediation. This makes sense intuitively, and indeed many tasks in mediated modalities are harder or take longer when compared to interacting in person. But when we think about it a little more, it is not that simple. In fact, we can have <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/everyday-dwelling-with-whatsapp/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">rich and fulfilling communication experiences in text messaging</a>. Critical help is <a href="https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/0227-5910/a000151" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">delivered successfully</a> on the telephone. We can <a href="https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9780745670331" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">form communities</a> and do everything from telling jokes to getting married in text-based games and channels. In video calling, <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/video-calling-in-long-distance-relationships-the-opportunistic-use-of-audiovideo-distortions-as-a-relational-resource/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">couples tease one another</a> as part of being intimate, and <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3313831.3376704" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">grandparents facilitate moments of togetherness</a> between migrant parents and their very young children. <a href="https://elizabeth-stokoe.medium.com/is-communicating-in-person-the-gold-standard-youre-asking-the-wrong-question-381a68626c10">Click Here</a>