Mmmmmm. Nonverbal communication can still be "direct" communication.
I don't know if this distinction makes a difference to everyone, but it might be better to think of that incident as a communication failure.
They failed to send a message you could successfully decode.
Failure can easily occur even when someone genuinely considers their attempt to communicate plain and direct — they've had success communicating this way before with a group or individual, and/or they learned this way of communicating the message from others, in a way that had felt intuitive. They are more or less confident the other person will at least get the general gist.
But if the person receiving the message being conveyed has never seen that message communicated in this particular way before, or otherwise doesn't have the general knowledge, particular context, shared culture, or same ability to interpret certain messages, then the message will simply not come across.
E.g. You can shout at someone until you're faint from hypoxia, believing this to be an infallibly direct method of communication, but if the other person can neither hear you nor read lips, they still will be stuck waiting for you to send the message some other way. You were being direct, but the message still failed to come across. It might arrive a lot later than what would normally be considered "direct" communication bc it will take you some time to a) notice the failure, b) think of an alternative way to send the same message, c) encode and try sending it again.
No one is at fault in this example; things just didn't work immediately. We all get frustrated by these failures now and then, but our desire to evade them once and for all can't ever be realized. Letting that desire go can be freeing, and even build up our tolerance to being misunderstood, expand our reserves of patience with ourselves and others, and grow the compassion we have for each other in such moments.
Communication always loses meaning along the way bc each message must be:
encoded — Message loss occurs due to the limitations of human language to capture all ideas, level of education, familiarity with the medium, etc.
sent, transmitted, received — Message loss occurs due to signal interference. Environments, situations, and mediums can cause interference, distortion, or drop/block the signal entirely. Either party may have a disability or inability to send/receive certain messages properly, whether permanently or temporarily.
decoded — Message loss occurs due to not having fluency in the language, level of education, emotionally-charged memories affecting interpretation, mental or physical state, not being able to decode the necessary jargon or slang, not being able to interpret the non-language aspects of the message (like math, orientation in space, visuals), not being savvy to in-group gestures, etc.
Not encoding and sending the best possible message can absolutely be something that's done bc the sender is being conflict-avoidant, malicious, deceitful, self-centered, unskilled with language, insecure, dismissive, suspicious, etc. For that matter, these same things can influence whether the receiver does their best at receiving, decoding, and interpreting.
The parties involved may also have a mismatch of high-context and low-context cultures, which is just a whole other bag of worms, but essentially they have a different cultural understanding of how much information can be reasonably implied without stating it explicitly. A high-context culture will shove a lot of extra details into the "we don't say these things out loud" category while still considering their communication direct and even glaringly obvious, while a low-context culture expects everything to be expressed in no uncertain terms if it is to be taken into consideration at all. This is not a binary system, but a loosey-goosey spectrum.
People from all the infinite macro- or micro-cultures are very much capable of being accommodating of these differences and finding a common tongue! It's just that sometimes people just don't notice or recognize what is happening. It's common and inescapable.
Explicit communication is valued to different degrees between different people, and depending on the circumstances or the individual differences between those involved, directness can vary widely in how it manifests. When we have a difficult time understanding the signals we care about/are interested in decoding as correctly as possible, we can share our confusion, ask for general accommodations, and/or ask for specific explanations. (Or if you're like me, I guess you can have a 7-hour conversation with the person about your cultures, intentions, interpretations, and expectations. Y'know, a typical coffee date.)
The ultimate thing is that conveying any form of message, between anyone, is (so to speak) doomed to sporadic failures. But that's perfectly normal and merely part of the price we (hopefully gladly) pay for all being so infinitely different from one another. 🫂
andulkaphoto
2087
titsay
tangentwithtanner
