Social skills not required?

Been on an Amsterdam tram lately? You couldn’t catch someone’s eye if you tried – everyone is more focused on their mobiles than a Jack Russell terrier at a badger-baiting competition. Calling, smsing, listening to music, downloading music, taking snaps, checking emails, tweeting, updating Hyves and/or Facebook, logging into Foursquare, cyber-bullying, playing games, watching videos, GPS tracking, organizing agendas, downloading docs, searching for apps… It makes for a quiet tram ride, sure, but what happened to just plain talking?

The same goes for the office. Back in the day a communications department, PR office, ad agency, what you will, didn’t so much hum along to the busy drone of business life, as clang and shout and clatter to the din of keyboards, faxes, telex machines (actually, even I don’t remember those), and the unchangeable ring of the old-fashioned, uni-functional, two-cups-and-a-piece-of-string telephone.

Nowadays we’re watching our email etiquette and abbreviating the lifeblood out of simple sentences on Twitter. We’re video-conferencing, enjoying tweet-fests from the comfort of our own living room, digging our likes, and skyping our parents. Before we know it, we’re living in a badly directed scene from Doctor Who where babies are raised by computers and drip-fed grow-food.

Is the communications industry responsible for the reduction in proper person to person communications? Maybe it’s just me but I always thought that real communication – the solid, authentic, trustworthy kind - was all down to relationships.

Take job interviews. You can follow someone on Twitter, check them out on LinkedIn and see their friends on Facebook. Their CV looks great. All good. Come 14.30, however, and you have a meeting with Jip or Janneke at your office. What happened to that online charisma? It’s shrunken, hiding behind a keyboard somewhere. Back in the boardroom the social skills have evaporated.

I know, times change. Channels of communications change. It’s exciting, necessary and also encouraging. It seems to me, though, that we’d be doing ourselves a favour if alongside embracing change, we came out from behind our laptops and remembered the quaint old days of conversation.

Having said that, if you want to catch someone’s attention these days, send them an actual hand-written letter.