Communication and Technology

Unless you're face-to-face with someone, all communication uses technology (and one could even argue that language is a type of technology so that would include every form of communication). There is no way to separate the use of technology from the act of communication, but different types of technology demand different strategies for communication to be effective.

Visual Communication

At least one third of people are primarily visual learners (the others are auditory or kinesthetic). So if you skip visual communication, you're leaving out at least 33 percent of your audience. PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi and other slide-based tools give you the opportunity to communicate visually, but they take some time and effort to master. If you use visual communication effectively, it can increase the retention of your message by 6 times, but if you use it poorly, it can actually decrease the retention of your message. 

Online Communication

Communicating online is not the same as other text-based communication. You can't simply substitute an email for a written letter or a blog post for a magazine article. Online communication is faster, more interactive and more democratic than ever before. It takes new skills and thought processes to communicate effectively online. 

Facebook

Recently Facebook passed 1 billion users and it continues to grow. More and more people are getting their news primarily through social media and important relationship information is often shared first online and then later in public. Facebook is a new world where people go to share, play, gripe and discuss. If it's used well, you can foster conversations between people who would never speak to each other in another forum. If it's used poorly it can reinforce negative stereotypes and further polarize people. 

Facebook is a mission field like none other. 

Blogs

Keeping a blog or a website is a helpful way to promote ideas and connect with people all around the world, but blogs take discipline, effort and interaction. It's easy to create a blog and sit back waiting for people to jump in, but with the billions of pages on the internet today, it's not likely that people will stumble across you if you don't do the work to seek them out. 

Blogs give you a chance to develop your ideas in longer format than Facebook or Twitter, but they also require more effort to develop a culture of followers who check in and see what you're doing. 

Promotion

There are times when it's appropriate to promote what you're doing online. If you're running a funding campaign or you're launching a new project and you want to generate excitement, you can promote it online. But there are rules to follow so that your promotion doesn't get lost in the crowd and it doesn't have the opposite effect you're looking for. There's a balance to be struck between getting the word out so people notice and being so annoying the people tune out and ignore you. 

How to alienate friends and frustrate people

Yesterday I got into a long conversation on Facebook with several of my friends. At my last check it was up to 75 comments and they spanned the gamut of thoughts on the topic. However, one of the comments was:

"wow...great conversation, totally changed my view point...said no one ever after a facebook debate like this!"

I may be the minority in this, but I have had my view changed, numerous times, by having a conversation (or even a debate) on Facebook. I don't think it's bragging to say that I'm very good at eliciting comments and creating conversation (both online and offline). I have friends who believe wildly different things and they all got together and had a civil discussion about one of the most divisive topics in our current sphere. So, how did I do it?

First, let me point out what is not working that I see on Facebook.

• Posting scripture quotes and references. Though it's good to share the bible with people, a status update on Facebook probably isn't the best place for it. You will immediately shut down conversation from anyone who might disagree with you. 
• Posting long status updates. It doesn't matter if it's your devotional thoughts for the day or your opinion on the current political climate or why you think your sports team will beat the other sports team in the upcoming sports match. If it's longer than two lines, it probably won't get much response. 
• Posting one-sided questions. If your status update takes a side from the outset you probably won't get much discussion. You might get supporters proclaiming their support of your thoughts and opponents proclaiming their opposition, but you won't people exploring the space between support and opposition. 
• Posting unfair, poorly researched or partisan statements. If your status assumes that half of all people are stupid, then it's probably not going to open up much dialog. Our social-political discussions are often reduced to the statement: "anyone with half-a-brain would think like me." If your base assumption is that opponents can't possess the same mental faculties that you do, then you will never have an open discussion. 

What do you see on Facebook that's just not working? 

I'll let you know how I'm able to have meaningful, transforming, thoughtful and kind Facebook conversations in the next post. 

 

There are 1 billion people on Facebook, so why will no one 'like' your status?

I've blogged about Facebook before, but today is a momentous day in the history of social media. Facebook passed one billion users today. That means one out of every seven people in the world is on Facebook. If Facebook was a country it would be the third largest population with over three times the people of the United States.

That's big.

I remember the presidential campaign of 2008. President Obama did a great job of connecting to potential voters through social media and the internet. The other candidates saw that and attempted to replicate his success. It fell flat because they just got online. They didn't actually take the time to engage the medium.

I was presenting to a group of people about how to use technology to communicate well and one older gentleman suggested that he could scan his hand-written notes and email them to people as a way to engage new audiences with technology. Though I applaud his attitude, his tact is a bad one.

Social media isn't an electronic version of another type of communication - it is an unique form of communication. You can't just take other content and recycle it for Facebook (or Twitter or Pinterest or your other social media site). You can't just sign up and wait for the people to come to you. You can't just post things and have conversation happen. It takes work to learn the language and culture of each social media platform so you can communicate well.

I'll offer some tips on how to really connect with people through Facebook on Friday. For right now, what have you learned about communicating online versus other forms of communication?

Repeat Yourself to be Heard

I don't remember my mom ever saying this, but it's a cliché mom thing to say: "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times..." I think this has something to do with the innate ability that moms have to know how communication needs to work.

If you're trying to communicate something to a large group of people, you need to repeat it at least once every 30 days for the message to stick. The more central the concept to the vision of the group, the more often it needs to be repeated.

So, if you want to change the core vision of your group. You have to repeat it every time you meet. Especially if you have a membership that fluctuates. Now, you probably shouldn't say exactly the same words every time, but you should focus on the same message.

Say, for example, that your church has a brand new vision and you're wanting to get everyone on board with it. You need to share that vision every week. Every meeting. But you don't need to just repeat it, you need to say it in a new way. So, if your vision is: "New churches in new places for new people." (this is the vision of Kairos Church Planting with whom I've worked extensively). You would say the basic vision every week, but then on one week you might tell a story about what "new churches" means, the next week you would highlight "new places" and then you could have a video clip of a new person for the third week. Just keep saying the same thing in different ways.

What message do you want your people to hear?

The History of Technology and Communication - the Future

So, what does the future of communication hold? The way that human brains work is that the more we do something, the more our brains are shaped to do things that way. It's called plasticity. Every action we take sends impulses along a neural pathway. The more times we do the same thing, the wider that pathway gets, until our brains default to sending impulses along a huge highway. This is similar to developing muscle memory from riding a bicycle - you never forget.

The more human communication is shaped by electronic media and the internet, the more our brains will function in that way. We will stop storing as many facts because we can easily find them online. We will seek filters, both relational and technological to weed out the bad sources of information and direct us to the good sources of information. We will see things as interconnected and relational rather than logical and linear.

And that will change everything. It took about one hundred years for the invention of the printing press to rearrange the brains of medieval Europe into the brains of Reformation and Renaissance Europe. The speed at which the internet as been adopted and spread around the world has drastically foreshortened the time that it will take to change everything again.

A few of the changes that are starting now are:

• Authority does not equal power or leadership. A look at the 2008 election will show that the majority of people who voted for Barack Obama were younger, internet connected people. One of his main campaign strategies was to connect with people through the internet. His message during the campaign was one of challenging the establishment and speaking for the people. He developed a relationship with people through social media and provided leadership based on an emotional appeal.
• Facts are decreasing in importance. In a world where a Google search can bring any bit of information at any time, knowledge of facts is not very important. They are cheap. Disposable. The ubiquity of knowledge makes it mundane and the mundane is ignored then forgotten. But connecting facts into new ideas is hugely important. Being able to discern which facts are valuable and which can be tossed into the growing heap is the skill of the future. Schools used to teach the memorization of facts, in the future they will need to teach the processing and creation of ideas.
• Relationships are getting cheaper. It used to cost to maintain relationships. It took time and effort to remain connected with people. Especially when people where far away, it would take calls and letters to stay in touch. But with the internet and social networking, a few hours allows you to re-connect with all of your acquaintances around the world. You can keep in touch with hundreds of people. But the quality of the relationship suffers. There's no real connection. The term "Facebook friend" carries the connotation of not a true friend, but someone worth keeping connected. If relationships are only dealt with through technology they begin to lose value. 

Everything will change. 

The History of Technology and Communication - the Internet

At the end of the 20th century the internet changed communication again. Rather thank keeping the power and the message in the hands of the wealthy, the internet decentralized all of it. Examples like Wikipedia and Linux are proof that the masses can come together to create something that is both free and high quality.

Giving a voice to everyone with an internet connection hasn't destroyed the positions of power in the world. There are still publishing houses, newspapers, television networks and movie studios and they still command a huge portion of the eyes and ears in the world. But what the internet does is provide competition. CNN has to compete with users on Twitter to break news stories. The Encyclopedia Britanica can no longer justify printing new volumes annually when Wikipedia is updated daily. There is no longer one, voice coming from the people of power; now the people without power can speak as well.

The flood of new voices, new words and new messages has required us to develop new skills. We are getting better and better at filtering and searching. We filter out messages that we deem to be false or useless. We weed out most of the ads that bombard us and we ignore most of the voices shouting on the internet. We filter things by our bias, by our knowledge and by our relationships. If we already believe something we aren't very  likely to listen to voices saying the opposite of what we believe. If we already know something we don't want to know something different. And if our friends trust voices that are online, we are more likely to trust those voices ourselves. The effect that used to be called "word of mouth" is now called "viral." If a video or blog goes viral, it's passed from friend to friend until it floods the internet. If anything, the invention of the internet has made the way we get information even more relational than it was before. Many people use social media as their primary news source, letting their friends sort out the important stories from the mundane.

We also have had to learn how to search for information. It used to be that finding knowledge meant going to a library or other repository of words. Then with television, the news was piped into our homes and our searching was comprised of button pushes on a remote control. But with the internet, the knowledge available is far exceeding our ability to store it. As of today there are 19.58 billion pages online. That's three web pages for every person on the face of the earth. With so much information available, we need to sort through it better than we ever could before. We rely on tools like Google to search the internet and bring back the best results. But because of that, our brains are adapting to remember fewer and fewer facts. When we know that the information is readily available, we are less likely to commit it to memory. Having the internet on phones has exacerbated the issue since we can now use Google nearly anywhere.

In a world where information has become incredibly cheap, filters, searches and the ability to draw conclusions from the information are increasing in value.

The History of Technology and Communication - Electronic Media

At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, communication jumped from static, written forms to dynamic, electronic forms. The telegraph, telephone, record player, radio and movies all hit the communication spectrum and transformed how we communicate. In a way.

See, before the advent of writing, communication was primarily oral. Speakers spoke and hearers heard. Moving to electronic media was actually a shift back to the oral communication that humanity started with. The pace and structure of communication shifted as well. Books are, of necessity, linear. They depend on a flow of thought and a logical process. Engaging in understanding books meant that human brains were re-wired to think in linear, logical patterns. But when communication shifted to a dynamic, emotional process that's a part of the oral communication culture, brains were re-wired again to process information from that perspective.

Moving to electronic media at the beginning of the 20th century made the communication faster and ubiquitous, but it kept the content firmly in the control of the people who could afford to produce it. The power structures shifted slightly, but only so far as to be able to incorporate the new players in places like Hollywood. There was no dissemination of power, just the accrual to different wealthy people.

At the end of the 20th century with the invention of the internet, all of that began to change.

The History of Technology and Communication - Printing

In the middle of the 15th century, one Johannes Gutenberg changed the world. There's debate about whether he actually invented the printing press with movable type, but the reality is that he made it a staple in Europe. He started by printing a bible, but soon the press was employed in printing everything. The classics of Greece and Rome were able to be reproduced and sold at a much lower cost. The learning that had been lost to Europe for centuries, exploded across the continent and then the world.

Printing drastically lowered the cost of written works. Once a book had to be hand copied by a scribe, but all of a sudden it could be mass produced. The written word was no longer captive to the wealthy and powerful. It was given to anyone with the ability to read (which was still a minority in most of the world). The spread of ideas to more people brought the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation and a host of other events that transformed history and culture around the world. The idea of democracy was made manifest in the reality of ideas being shared by everyone in common. Benjamin Franklin took the concept to the next level by proposing the public library so that all people could have access to the wealth of knowledge available in books.

Words became cheaper, more common and more influential with the rise of the printing press. The more eyes and ears that encountered the words, the more influence the words could have. But  the industry of publishing kept a hold on what could be printed. The bottleneck of the printer kept every person from being able to espouse their ideas to the world. Only those deemed worthy (or marketable) by the printer would be published. This led to a sort of trust in the printed word. The hurdles to having a work printed prevented false, misleading and subversive work from being publicly disseminated (in general, most of the time). So words printed in a book or newspaper were to be trusted. The Yellow Journalism of the 19th century manipulated whole countries due to the trust that was placed in the printed word.

It took the rise of electronic media in the 20th century to shatter that trust.

The Emotion of Animations and Transitions

Animations and transitions are to PowerPoint communication what your verbal pauses and body language are to spoken communication. When you're speaking, your words convey the heart of your message, but the nuance is carried by the tone of your voice, the pauses between words and the way you hold yourself when you speak.

If you stepped on stage slowly with your eyes on the ground and then slowly lifted them to the crowd and said in a hushed voice: "We must all mourn the loss of our great leader." The crowd would mourn with you.

If you marched out on stage with your head held high and loudly proclaimed: "We must all mourn the loss of our great leader!" While pounding your fist on the podium. Then the crowd would fall into line as a military company.

If you pedaled onto the stage atop a unicycle while wearing a clown nose and then danced around while saying: "We must all mourn the loss of our great leader." The crowd would laugh at the joke.

PowerPoint animations are just as varied in the response they request from the audience. A subtle fade versus a sudden swipe across the screen carries a different connotation. Large, loud and garish animations are best used with similar content. If you're wanting to make subtle points, use subtle animations and transitions.

What rules do you have about using animations and transitions in your presentations?

Say Less to Communicate More

I spent the end of June in Germany on tour with my community choir. You can read more about our exploits here.

One of the nights on tour we were in the town of Trossingen and we were invited to a garden party. We walked over to the location and were handed coupons for free drinks. We sat down and felt very out of place - at first. It took us a while to connect with the people there. They were speaking German and we could speak very little German. But when Helga brought out the accordion and they started singing songs, we were able to make our way over to join in the fun. We didn't know what they were singing, but we enjoyed it anyway.

I spent a good portion of the night talking to Uwe (OO-veh). He could speak some English (much more than I could speak German), but if I spoke to quickly or used a lot of American idioms he couldn't understand me. So I slowed down my speech, I used simple words and sentence construction and we had a great time talking together.

That night in Trossingen we communicated quite a lot. We shared songs and laughter, but relatively few words. Many words do not make good communication.

The photo is from TOB Trossinger Online Bilderportal.

Putting Audio in PowerPoint (part 1)

Before tackling the how, I want to first address the why. Just like anything else that you might drop into your presentation, audio needs to have a purpose. Back up and look at your purpose for standing up in front of people. You want to communicate with them. Your purpose for this particular time is that you want to communicate something specific to them. Keep narrowing your focus until you have a clear, specific understanding of what you want to communicate and what effect you want it to have on the audience. Then you can cut out good content for the sake of the overall purpose of your communication.

If you want to add in sound effects for your slides, don't. OK, that may be too broad a statement, but 99% of the time you should avoid superfluous sound effects. They may be fun, but they will rarely add anything to your communication. Sound effects have to be perfectly aligned with your message and add something significant to the point that you are making. If they don't (and they usually don't) then avoid them.

Other audio clips might be more of a grey area. You might want to include a bit of a song or a clip of a speech or sermon that pertains to your topic. Apply the same filter to see if it aligns perfectly with your message and it supports the point you're wanting to make. Then cut off the first and last 30 seconds of the clip. Again, I'm being a bit extreme, but not as much as you might think. If the audio clip is so important to what you're trying to communicate that you have to have it, that's fine, but you are still the one communicating. Don't let the audience move away from your point to the clip. Keep them with you. As a general rule, keep your clips under 30 seconds.

How do you use audio in your presentations?

Stories Connect Us (part 1)

We speak and think in stories. Stories are the core of who we are, how we define ourselves and how we find our connection with the world. If you want to communicate well, you must use the principles of story to do so. This wisdom goes back to Aristotle and beyond.

The three main elements of a story are the setting, the conflict, and the resolution. Sure, your high school English Literature teacher told you all about the denouement and a bunch of other stuff about how the forest symbolizes the chaos of the world, but that's not going to help you be a better preacher (probably). Thinking of how you can connect to people through the basic elements of story, however, will give you a better chance at connecting with people and through that connection, communicating powerful words to them.

Go Toward the Light

This images is a powerful communicator all on its own. What sermon would you preach based on this image? 

Flow

If you haven't heard of TED yet (you must not read my blog very often) you need to. TED is all about ideas worth sharing and they come from all walks of life. In the talk below Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (you try and pronounce it) shares from his research about what it takes to make us happy.


The whole talk is good (just under 20 minutes), but one thing stood out to me that I wanted to share with you. His research shows that humans can only absorb about 110 bits of information at one time (a stream of data like body language, words being spoken, smells, feelings of hunger, etc.). Paying attention to a person speaking requires about 60 bits of information, so we can't pay attention to two speakers at once (not fully, at least). 


But if we are only speaking, then we are leaving 50 bits of information unused. Those bits are going to go to something - like a feeling of hunger or noticing the cute girl down the row. For every bit we leave un-engaged, we are losing impact for our message. 


Keep people visually engaged through media and keep them mentally engaged through inductive preaching. I dare you.

Communicator Focused vs. Recipient Focused

I was recently listening to a podcast by Mark Driscoll of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle. He was talking about the power of preaching and how to tell a good preacher. He said that the difference is if the sermon is communicator focused or recipient focused. The former is when the preacher feels good about the sermon preached. The latter is when the church is transformed by the sermon.

Mark said that he measures the effectiveness of a preacher or teacher through the transformation of the listeners. That's huge. Too often we want to be our own judges as we preach - some of us will go so far as to ask our wife what she thought. But, if we're honest, most of us just take the compliments we receive after church at face value. "Nice sermon." "Good lesson." "Thanks for sharing."

What if we had an anonymous survey that asked, not if people liked the sermon, but if they have applied the principles that were preached?

Would this change your use of media in your preaching? If the focus is on the church, shouldn't we do everything we can to communicate to them in transformational ways?

The Once and Future Brain #5

This whole week we've been looking at the way that the internet has changed our brains and what that means for communication and preaching (you can catch up here: 1, 2, 3, 4).

I want to end the week by bringing the conversation back around to the main point of this blog - visual communication is essential for reaching the people of the internet generation.

The history of our communication has, in some ways, come full circle. We started as pre-literate people who used story and image to communicate - the cave drawings found all over the world attest to this. Eventually we developed written language and that drastically changed our brains and our world - images were still very important for the illiterate (90% or more of the population). Then the printing press came and made words cheap, but images stayed expensive, we shifted away from images and focused on words. Now with the internet changing communication again, images are storming back to the front.

If you want to communicate with people who have grown up with the internet, an information rich environment where images and audio combine with text, then you need to use information rich means. The other option is losing them - they won't pay attention to a talking head. This isn't because they're young, this is because their brains are drastically different. This isn't a fad that will go away in time - this is as significant as the printing press. You must change or you will become irrelevant.

Am I wrong?

The Once and Future Brain #4

So this week we have been looking at the way that our brains have changed due to the internet.

One of the major things that has changed is the trust that people place in what they see and hear. We are becoming more and more skeptical all the time. In a way, it's a defense mechanism. We are surrounded by advertisements all the time - if we didn't develop filters to allow us to sort out the good from the bad, we would buy everything and be broke.

We need some skepticism to survive in this brave new world, but that has a huge impact on how we can communicate the gospel. See, if we try to be the authority on the bible, people's skeptical walls will go up. They've been told by three out of four dentists to buy every kind of toothpaste ever made. Positional authority is almost meaningless in convincing people of anything. We have developed broad neural pathways of skepticism and so hearing that something is truth because an authority figure says so, will always be met with doubt.

We need to look at cultivating a relational authority with people. Basically, people trust their friends, so in order for people to trust us, we need to be their friends. We need to tear down the barrier that divides us from the people to whom we're preaching. We need to open the door into our lives and invite them in to see a gospel that isn't true because of our seminary degree, but it's true because it works for us. It works for their friends, and they trust their friends a lot more than dentists.

Photo Gathering and Editing #2

On today's episode, we will look at how to find good photos online. This is something that I've covered a few times in the past, but it's important. In one of my first posts I highlighted the great list over at Presentation Zen, that gives links to several places to find photos online.

The problem is that it can be very difficult to find the right image for what you are trying to communicate. Just opening up Google Images to search is fine, but if you just type in 'Jesus' you are likely to have a hard time narrowing it down to the point you want to make.

In this case, using some good communication principles can be very helpful. The principles will help you to weed out the bad images and focus in on the good images.
1. Visual communication adds to your presentation. The adding can be emotional or informational, but your best bet is to stick to the emotional side of things. The important thing here is that your image should say the same thing as your words, but in a different way. Maybe your words are a exegeting the text - your image can be a metaphor for your point. Ask yourself: what image will add emotion to the point that I'm trying to make?

2. Images should dwell in the cognitive gap that lies between the speed of speaking and the speed of thinking. Images need to offer people something to think about while you are speaking that will point them back to what you are saying. In the past people dealt with this gap by taking notes or reading the bible passage in question, but now very few people do that. It's important to not distract with an image - if you do, then they will think about something other than your sermon. Ask yourself: where is my point coming from and where is it going? You can use images to get people thinking toward your next point.

3. Less is more. Often I'm tempted to try and do too much with my pictures. I want to illustrate every point and highlight every nuance of the sermon. But if I do that I end up overloading the church and overworking myself. Too much information will lead to poor communication just as too little will. I typically have three to five images in my sermon. Sometimes I will use a blank slide in between to bring the focus back to what I'm saying. Ask yourself: what are the most important points in my sermon?

I know this doesn't make it simple to find the perfect image, but with these principles you can do a much better job of communicating the message with power and imagination.