Communication Breakdown

When Led Zeppelin came out with their smash hit “Communication Breakdown” the world of Rock and Roll changed forever. Led Zeppelin was an English four-piece band that sounded like twenty. The band featured a guitar player who played beyond loud, with skills unsurpassed, and the group included a bass player and keyboardist who was all over the place all the time. A standalone singer enhanced the act with a range like none other, and to round out the exciting new sound and bring the melodic bedlam into a dynamic cohesion was a drummer with the most brilliant and heavy-handed style ever recorded.

Led Zeppelin was indeed a breakthrough rock band like no other and they were singing about an urgent problem with a communication breakdown. Today in the new millennium, we just might be experiencing our very own communication breakdown because of new technology that is sending us backward and into a land where communication is perhaps missing the mark.

Years ago, when the golden era of hard Rock and Roll was taking off like a moon rocket, a very good Marco Beach Boy called home every week to his mother. The weekly phone call was difficult and hard to place however, because the Marco Beach Boy’s mother was deaf. Every week, a trip to a special phone had to be completed. At the very special phone, voices did not travel over the telephone wires. Instead, there was an illuminated screen where Scott would type on a terminal and the Marco Beach Boy’s mother would read the text that would show on her visual telephone in her home in Michigan.

Every time Scott would “phone home,” and type in his messages to his mom, he would afterward always make the same comment. “It’s good to write the messages, and I’m sure she looks forward to reading what I’m saying, but I feel like there is a lot missing - for both of us!”

During a recent sailing outing near Marco Beach, a new light began to shine on the way we communicate today. After meeting an English professor from Penn State and watching her as she watched three teenagers furiously texting away in a frenzy that seemed to be unstoppable, Professor Collins finally raised her hand in a friendly manner and began waving at the teenagers. There was no response. The three pairs of thumbs were relentless on the tiny screens - even as the English Professor began to wave wildly - there was still no response.

Everyone that was not texting and transfixed on the tiny screens now realized we were in the middle of an experiment and perhaps a Communication Breakdown. After looking around to the other four aboard our catamaran who were now watching critically, Professor Collins began clapping her hands in a loud syncopated rhythm that sounded like something Led Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham might have produced in the 1970’s. There was, however, no response from the texting trio. After smiling like a conspirator, the professor loudly asked, “Has anyone here ever heard of the 7% rule?” Even though she was speaking, Professor Collins never stopped her heavy-handed syncopated drumming that was now resonating on the sailboat deck. With the professor’s direction and encouragement, everyone that was not texting spoke up together. “No,” we said loudly as a chorus, “No, we have never heard of the 7% rule.”

Surprisingly, there was no response from the overly focused and massively compelled texting trio. They continued with their texting, unaffected; and without ever looking up. Their thumbs were a blur, and their eyes were bulging!

Finally, Professor Collins gave up on the loud deck drumming and stood up on the sailboat deck. She then screamed at the top of her lungs with a vocal rendition that would have made Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin proud. “Shark!” she screamed, but there was no shark. Only the open gulf. Then she began waving and pointing out to sea. “Shark!” she screamed again. “It’s a killer shark!” she lied.

Finally, with alarm, the texting trio looked up suddenly, but still held their phones at the ready. The texting trio were not sure if the wild woman’s information was true. The shark information was not coming through on the Internet.

After the trio of texting teens were finally interrupted, and now focused on the woman and the make-believe shark, Professor Collins once again sat down on the deck and spoke with an encouraging tone that only college professors can command. “May I please explain something,” she said with elegance. “Something that might be perhaps more important than a killer shark swimming beside our boat.” 

Her elegant command of the English language worked. The teens were distracted into watching and listening. The remaining four of us that had been watching the professor’s experiment were now also more than attentive as the graceful Professor Collins explained. “The 7% rule is simply that only 7% of communication is verbal. The other 97% is non-verbal. The non-verbal content of human language is composed of body language and voice tone. Body language commands 55% of all interactions and voice tones are always enhancing 38% of all human communication.”

The texting teens seemed baffled and perplexed, but they were now attentive. Their phones were down. “How could this be true?” one of the kids asked. “Text is only 7% of communication?”

The professor continued, and her voice was gentle but compelling. “When people speak to us in person, we absorb only 7% of what they are saying from the words they speak. We understand 55% of what is being said by body gestures, posture, and other physical clues. We understand 38% of human communication by vocal inflection and tone.”

“Kids,” Professor Collins was trying to draw the teens into the group, “imagine music,” she said. “If we just watched the lyrics of a song on the screen of a phone or computer, there would not really be any music. We would just have the text, which would only be 7% of the total artwork. For full musical content, we must have the rhythm of the drums and the percussion. We must have the melody of the music in all of the parts. The keyboard, the guitar, and the bass, all of these go together in concert to produce the effect that has changed human history. When we just text someone, and don’t hear their voice and the inflections that relay emotion, we really are having a modern-day Communication Breakdown.”

When Professor Collins finished her elegant lesson, one of the texting trio raised his hand as if in class. “Where is the killer shark?”

Tom Williams is a Marco Islander and the author of two books: “Lost and Found” and “Surrounded by Thunder - The Story of Darrell Loan and the Rocket Men.” Both books are available on Kindle and Nook.