October 15, 2022 permalink
All Communication is Lossy →
A nice piece on how the significant problem with communication between individuals isn’t so much that the conversation is lossy, it’s the lack of acknowledging and correcting for that “signal loss”.
Adopting the mindset that lossiness is a fact of life has another benefit: that of beginning to see communication not as simply a transference but as a generative space. That is, we often think of communication as simply moving understanding from one place to another, the way we might move electrons from a substation to a home. This assumption is behind a lot of otherwise well-intentioned efforts to reduce or even eliminate synchronous communication, as it can seem wholly inefficient compared with other methods. But the best communication makes way for something new to emerge in the exchange. It’s not passive but generative, not mere delivery but a creative transformation.