Computers And Communication

Advancement is a collective effort of every generation. Take a look at the Internet. It was once upon a time supposed to be solely used for military communication purposes. But overtime, we have eventually evolved and turned it into a super highway of communication and a massive gathering of intelligence and data accessible worldwide.

Communication is the ability to transmit our words that represent our thoughts, observations, and everything we could think to say. Through the existence of the Internet, new things have spawned — smartphones, online gaming, blogging, or online communication to summarize. We have become digital. Our words can now travel across the globe in a matter of second. But we all know what comes with great power.

In a world where email, text messages, and social network private messaging capabilities are the common medium of communication every day, there is just a lot that we are starting to lose in the art of business communication, both verbally and in writing. These media are readily available any time of the day and deliver our messages real-time. Unfortunately, like all conveniences afforded to us by everything that we have created for humanity, it seems that they all have benefitted us greatly, but to some degree, degenerated us. And it is not just because of the millennials, as some grumpy Gen Xers would say, as most advancements today were created by us. That includes the greater part of the Internet. Boomers started it, we developed it, and the young, like all other species, adapt to it and further cultivate it.

1. Emoticon dependence. This might have started with the younger generation, but a lot of people, including tech-savvy young at hearts, have now become dependent in using smileys to represent their emotions in their messages. I get it. It makes you sound less cold in writing straight to the point messages. It makes you less serious about petty matters. It makes you look sadder whenever you need to show you are. But our reliance to these symbols have seem to blur out the fact that there is an innumerable and continuously expanding amount of words ever created that we could use that would perfectly describe our emotions in our sentences. We are now too lazy to learn even a few synonyms. Antiquated as studying a thesaurus is, we all have the ability to communicate anything we want, even emotions, through words. Add a few more words in your vocabulary from time to time.

2. Spellchecks and shortcuts. This is what I do not understand — that given all the convenience in every facet of life, we still seem to be always running out of time. It’s either that, or some keys in their keyboard are missing. Some of us are fond of using shortcuts so we can send faster, while some are still caught up with the shortcut trend that arose back when there were still bar phones, and you have to exert serious effort in tapping keypads to make a completely spelled word. This is something that we should learn to stop. We are all learned people. We have all the time needed to spell correctly. Smartphones now contain the full set of letters using the QWERTY layout.

Spellchecks and autocorrects are great features that help us spell properly, even for words whose spelling we are not sure of. However, it’s not a fully functioning add-on. It occasionally makes mistakes, and sometimes, changes the entire word. Learn not to be dependent on autocorrects because written communication has nuances that are not yet well handled by that function. Download a dictionary app that can help you check the correct spellings.

3. Grammar checks. We have this neat little feature in all word processing software that shows us when we have committed basic grammatical errors. And there is another little feature to go with it that allows us to let the computer automatically make the necessary corrections for us. This cool function has made a lot of our work easier, especially for the college students preparing their academic papers. But remember that grammar checks can only review each sentences, and not the paragraph as a whole. This becomes a problem with consistency of voice, and arrangement of thought. Learn the difference between passive and active voices, parallelisms, and subject-verb agreements.

Computers will always be there to help us and we will continue to make our lives easier through the course of time. But the art of language must not vanish as communication is our way to convey our messages to everyone. At least, for now, there are certain aspects that can only be done manually, that is, by our own mind.
*Originally published by the Manila Bulletin, C-4, Sunday, July 10, 2016. Written by Ruben Anlacan, Jr. (President, BusinessCoach, Inc.) All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or copied without express written permission of the copyright holders.