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Knowing how to communicate effectively is essential in human relations.
The meaning of the proverb “silence is golden'' escaped me for a long time. How could children cruelly refusing to speak to one another be such a treasured thing?
“Cut eye.” rolling of the eyes, sidelong glances, steupsing and sniggering were all very potent, wordless ways of relaying slights and displeasure in childhood interactions.
One learned with time that it was not just the absence of words but what we understand by it that is important, and also how to incorporate more attractive, non-verbal communications into one’s skills set while developing even more important language skills, which included knowing when not to speak.
At the moment, we face a communications crisis. The IT era has ushered in new ideas needing new words, and we shortcut spellings in the interest of available space and the ever-increasing shortness of time.
Consequently, so much of what we commonly understood before and how we interact linguistically is in freefall. English, without an academy to protect it, as exists in Spanish and French, has very successfully, over centuries, shifted and allowed itself to be moulded by different cultures.
Now, with the IT revolution and being the principal language of IT, a wider English lexicon has grown up but, paradoxically, we have got worse at communication.
A very good example is the ongoing debacle of a major TT bank’s disastrous relaunching of its online banking system. Without doubt, it is the most fraught experience of my banking history.
Ten days of being locked out of my account, unable to be answered by the constantly busy main switchboard operators, then eventually abandoning a 45-minute wait for the dedicated helpline to respond, followed a few days later by 39 minutes on the phone with a supervisor, assisted by her staff, to walk me through regaining access to my account.
They could not understand why the system was doing what it was doing. Then my credit and debit cards were inexplicably rendered unusable.
There are obviously severe IT problems, but they were not helped by the totally inadequate communication to customers about what to expect.
[caption id="attachment_860196" align="alignnone" width="433"] Marina Salandy-Brown -[/caption]
Only at the very end of the eventual enlightening and welcome conversation with the supervisor did I understand that in future you can only access online banking by using a mobile phone.
That is such a major change that it should have been communicated loudly and clearly to customers. There is a worrying divide between people who are totally in command of IT and others who are not, and the people with the knowledge do not comprehend that it is a new language which others must learn.
Language does not exist on its own, it relates to a culture, and understanding what is not said, what is between the lines, what we intuit, is an important part of the culture of human communication.
Yet so much of the process and language of the bank’s rollout of its new interface was so
counterintuitive that the unsuspecting customer of average intelligence was foiled.
I worry about the cavern between the IT cognoscenti and the rest. I have seen how previous generations are unable to navigate today’s world, and I fear that many of us are heading in the same direction at full speed.
Once, any one of us could open our car bonnet and understand something about what was inside and what we might do to fix a small problem. No longer, that skill resides solely with others.
My company website is now so sophisticated that even the best young people on my team must hand over to the webmaster.
Retaining the ability to help oneself is being eroded, and the people with the skill, largely, do not recognise the gap to be bridged.
It matters that we identify this challenge because a sizeable part of the population is already being left behind.The TT government is very tardy and the incumbents have been provoked by the pandemic to speed up engagement with the dire need to bring systems and the nation’s people into the digital age. I hope the appointment of a new Minister of Digital Transformation is recognition of the size of the job we must undertake.
For me, public transformation is about ensuring all of us end users benefit from the digital transformation and that nobody is left on the sidelines. I advocate local government being charged with this task. Local IT centres should be established, with computers and/or smartphones and orientation sessions for all citizens, followed by regular capacity-building workshops where everyone is taught how to interact with ministry portals and to gather information.
The issue already exists of too many students from poor homes being excluded from education because of their lack of IT access and parents being unable to assist. Some parents must feel as useless as drivers looking under their car bonnets, yet we all make up society and technology should unite, not divide us.
 
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