Me, my brain and communication asymmetry

When I was single-digit years old, my tiny home town still used landline telephony with manual switchboards. My parents had to raise the receiver, wait for some human operator to pick up, say the number they wanted to call out loud, and wait for the operator to do whatever magic necessary. Not that I cared about things this mundane back then, but I saw this scene so many times it’s engraved in my memory.

“Nine forty, please!”

That ritual of asking human operator to get things done might be why I didn’t like telephones as a kid. I have vivid memories of not wanting to pick up incoming calls or talk to people who had expressed the will to speak with me (I would eventually be forced to succumb anyway). There was something odd about telephones that my brain couldn’t express. So I keep this thing next to my head? And someone hears what I say? And they talk back? What kind of sorcery was that?

Despite growing up I never got any tutoring on how to talk on the phone like those 1950s kids.

To be frank, for most of my childhood I rarely needed telephony for anything. My town was small enough to have all of my friends within walking distance. We saw each other every day at school. In the afternoons we would hang out at the same few places.

Of course we moved from manual switchboards towards more automatic kinds of magic, including cordless phones with redial feature. Even then most of my phone conversations were transactional in nature. “Hey, are you home? Can I drop by? Awesome, I’m coming!”

In early 2000s I got my first mobile phone - that heavy Motorola with a tiny monochromatic screen and internet access that could burn a month of my pocket money within a few minutes. So I used it mostly for texting. Texts, or SMS as we call them on this side of the pond, were the most cost-effective. We learnt to type efficiently and cramp tons of information into 160 characters.

Text messages had one specific quality: unlike phone calls, they were… I don’t know how to call it. Symmetrical? My brain didn’t feel any disparity between sending and receiving messages. It all happened on the same screen. It was a very simple and convenient form of communication. Almost like written letters.

Phone calls, on the other hand, felt awkward. Unlike my parents who could spend hours chewing the fat with their relatives hundreds of kilometres away, I couldn’t.

Many years later, even though I got substantially better at phone calls, I unexpectedly got back to think about it all again.

Luke the streamer, lol

In 2010s and early 2020s I played a lot of video games. I also watched a lot of Twitch streams.

A less known fact, still verifiable by a tiny group of people, is that I streamed myself on Twitch too. I played ranked games of StarCraft 2 as well as ‘casual’ games to relax afterwards.

On my streams, despite owning a good microphone and a webcam, I rarely talked. I would start talking only when any of “my” people would show up and start chatting. Sometimes I’d disable my webcam and just keep playing while responding to chat messages in writing.

When it comes to growing a community on Twitch, decent microphone and ability to talk while nobody is listening is a must-have. I struggled a lot with that. I was surrounded by long-time Twitch friends who understood my struggle - and that still didn’t help. I saw people reacting charitably to me on Twitch chat but things weren’t improving. I couldn’t explain why.

At first I thought it had to do with me being a craftsman rather than an entertainer. My ‘default’ creative mode is spending time building things, making them as perfect as possible, and releasing them once they’re ready. As a live streamer, I distribute my product immediately, no matter how half-baked.

My software, photography, or anything else I produce and release as a craftsman, eventually starts living its own life. None of the things I produce, commercially or not, needs me to exist.

On Twitch however, it’s impossible to produce entertaining content without putting oneself on stage. People expect to watch and interact with broadcasters, while everything else is just a background. Every time I made an attempt to come to terms with that truth, anxiety and self-awareness were eating me inside.

I never made a streaming career. Even those 70 followers on my Twitch channel were gained in, uhm, rather disputable ways. But that’s a story for another time.

This strange phenomenon I can’t name

On some random sleepless night in 2020s I noticed parallels between both stories, the one about my telephone ‘anxiety’ and the one about my streaming failure.

Both of them involved some sort of communication asymmetry.

When I use a telephone, I can hear a person talking to me but I can’t see their reactions. I have to talk to a strange device next to my ear rather than to that person’s face. I suspect my brain doesn’t like this kind of asymmetry.

My problem with Twitch streaming was that my viewers would see and hear me live, but they would respond with text. I could see their messages but I couldn’t see them in the same capacity as they could see me.

Now, this wasn’t the usual case of me being a shy introvert (that I am anyway). I played many hours of video games with different streamers, with or without voice chat. I joined a random StarCraft clan just to have people to play games with. I loved all of that.

For a brief period of time I thought it was my anxiety about language skills. Neither was that a correct call. People are way more forgiving than I give them credit for and I could feel it. Outside Twitch, I had many job interviews in English. Nah, language is the least of my concerns.

So… brain, what is this?

I eventually realized I like writing because writing and reading are asynchronous by definition. I don’t mind sending emails or texting because I’ll get replies in exact same medium.

But if I speak and I can’t see another human reacting, something feels off to my peanut brain.

To skew things even further, exceptions happen. The same peanut brain of mine doesn’t mind meetings or pair programming sessions with webcams off. I like transactional phone calls instead of written communication (they’re often faster) and I don’t mind scheduled calls, with or without a webcam. I don’t know what makes these different. Maybe it’s the fact those kind of conversations are focused on specific goals and my brain is too busy to think deeper.

That unnamed phenomenon has interesting consequences.

First, I no longer expect to succeed on any medium involving video AND me being on stage, so I keep writing those stupid blog posts instead of recording videos. At the same time, I imagine having fun playing cooperative games involving tons of communication (think Counter Strike) if I join a team I get to love and trust.

Second, I feel a lot of sympathy towards underappreciated groups of people who just do their thing and give no shit. I love watching Twitch streams run by people who talk barely or not at all. I love no-commentary game walkthroughs on YouTube. I respect and appreciate everyone who puts themselves on stage despite their anxiety.

Now, I don’t know what to do with all of this. I wish there was some sort of educative conclusion here. Maybe there is some magic pill I haven’t discovered yet. Maybe I just need to git gud at certain things.

All I know for now is that Ian Betteridge is right that the shrug emoji makes perfect sense for a closing paragraph.

🤷