The first thing I did when I got my iPhone 5 back in 2012 was make sure that it made the right noises. I expected to hear that little jingle whenever someone called me, and that boo-doo-deep of a text message. When I am asked why I have never changed my ringtone or text tone the answer comes immediately, “That is just the way iPhones should sound.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love my phone, but there is a truth to this rectangle in my left pocket that is difficult to come to grips with and makes me want to cover my ears and pretend I am not listening when I think about it. This truth makes me worry at night about what will become of humanity. This dark truth is growing rapidly, expanding exponentially, and devouring the fields of our conversations and relationships as we move into new an uncharted communication territory.

The truth is that we are separating out our primary, secondary, and tertiary communications into broken channels of communication that guise themselves as full-fledged conversations. As communication technology has developed, we have found new ways to separate out the strands that make for a strong Communication. Each new way of communicating has moved towards being easier and easier, while sifting out bits and pieces of what it truly takes in order to communicate effectively.

In order to understand what we are doing to our communication, we need to understand Primary communications and what can happen to them when we isolate them from a full Communication. In this blog post we will explore what Primary communications are, how we have isolated them from the Secondary and Tertiary communications and the impact that has on our conversations. For our sake, we will call them Primaries, Secondaries, and Tertiaries.

Primary Communications

Let’s begin by defining exactly what I am talking about when I say the word Primary communication. A Primary communication is the component of a Communication that is designed to get your idea into the head of another person. Here is an example. Don’t think about elephants. What did you think about? Was it elephants? You either thought about them, or thought about not thinking about them, but both of those thoughts came from me and my words got the idea to you.

Now, when you isolate Primaries, you are eliminating the author of the words from the equation. This happens because Secondaries contain the author’s self in the writing. You can tell a lot about a writer when you read what he wrote, but when you isolate the Primary from the Secondary, you lose yourself in the idea that you are transmitting. Let me put this into focus for you.
A Poet’s job is to transmit an idea from their brain into yours through the use of words. When a poet begins to write their poem, they are thinking about the idea and the idea alone. They pick words that artistically and fancifully get the thought or emotion across that they intended to, while also trying to write in such a way as to eliminate them from what they wrote. When you finish a poem, you end feeling engulfed in the ideas swirling in your head from what you have read.

My father has read a poem that he memorized ten years ago to me, and every time that he reads it, it creates in me an emotion that I wasn’t going to have otherwise. The poem is about balloons and how as a child the person in the poem always wanted one, but their mom said they couldn’t have one. By the time the person reaches adulthood, they can have all the balloons they want, but they don’t want them anymore. The poem conveys sadness only with words. When we isolate the Primaries, there is no emotional inflection from Secondaries and no relational communication from Tertiaries.

Let’s try an example together. Read this to yourself, or listen to me read. This poem is by Robert Frost, and it is called, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

 

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here