If you want to talk about bandwidth, a “fattest pipe,” then human bodies communicating face to face in the same room still dwarf any other channel.

The Good Stuff—All on a Mobile Phone?

An ad jumps out across your screen, mostly covering the information you want to read. They’re getting so annoying, you think, these aggressive, space-grabbing web ads. Still your eyes follow a mixed up group of pictures, all moving towards the ad’s centerpoint. Some wink out. Others pop in, replacing them. They all grow smaller and begin to form a rectangular shape. God, you think, what IS this?

You see a sailboat, a wineglass, hands clasping, many shots of a young daughter in white dancing or smiling. Finally, this wistful collage morphs into a modern, Internet-enabled cell phone. You hear the punch line. “Connect to all the things you love in life."

But how wise is this guidance? Is relying more and more on this little device the key to all that’s good and wholesome?

The Ad is Eye Candy

The graphic display is pure “eye candy.” If you read my past columns (or previous posts here) you know that eye candy is intended to slip emotional affect past the guardian function of rational thought.

Does Goodwill Pass Through Really Thin Pipes?

So what about goodwill? If we look at face-to-face communication, voice only, email letters, and text messages—how easy is it to maintain goodwill over these different channels.

Probably you are familiar with the notion of “bandwidth.” That’s a matter of how “fat” the “pipe” is, how many channels does a communication link have and how much data can be moved through each one. In cyberspace, higher bandwidth is what brings you instant loading of web pages, animations instead of stills, and videos that play on the click of the mouse without stopping every few seconds for the data stream to catch up. Bandwidth is cool, in any form.

Thin, Thinner, Thinnest

And bandwidth is crucial to all human communications. What Internet and computer marketspeak never refers to is this. When you move from face-to-face, to voice only, to email, to text messages, you encounter in each case a drastic and dramatic decrease in bandwidth. A kind of amazing truth here is that the voice-only pipe is a trickle compared to the in person face-to-face pipe. And email’s pipe is a trickle compared to voice only. And texting is a trickle compared to email.

So right away—you know there’s a problem. Cyberspace, for most, is still primarily text and email. There’s no way “everything you love in life” can come to you through their tiny bandwidths. Rationally, this may sound obvious. The ad's “eye candy” wants to slip its message right past your rational process. And of course a cell phone can help you in various ways. We’ll come back to that in a minute. Making good cybersense means seeing both sides of a profound shift.

Face-to-Face Means Mega-Bandwidth

But where do I get this “amazing truth” about bandwidth? Well, it’s simple really. In “real space,” face-to-face with people, you have four powerful sensory channels available: sight, sound, smell, and touch. The sounds of language are inflected with constant nuances of tone, volume, and pacing. Facial expressions, posture, and gestures, and the general flow of shared activity all flow into an extremely rich (high bandwidth) calculation of “what someone really means.”

Faces Really Do Talk

Face-to-face signals indicating irony or sarcasm can shift that meaning all the way into the opposite of what is literally said—which is all that would appear in text. Or take a dirt-simple sentence like, “I did not walk home today.” Say it aloud it to yourself first with even stress on all the words, then again with heavy stress in turn on WALK, HOME, and TODAY. Watch the meanings shift drastically. First you get “I didn’t go home at all today,” then “I did go home but didn’t WALK,” then “I walked today but not to my HOME,” and “I’ve walked home at other times, but not TODAY.”

These examples provide just a tiny glimpse of how much typically goes missing in cyberspace. Telephone retains at least all the intonations, which helps a lot, but strips facial expression, gesture, and shared activity. Email, without even the intonations, especially written and read in haste—will lead to misunderstandings far more often. Get the intended literal meaning wrong, add a little confusion about someone’s emotional attitude towards you—and you are off on the wrong foot. Put simply, goodwill can survive here in many circumstances, but it takes much more care and feeding.

CEO’s Travel Far for Face-Time—Bandwidth Really Matters

Top international CEO’s spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and up to 180 days a year flying around the world to get face time with their key managers. They understand that bandwidth is crucial to their success. At the same time, I know couple with children on the edge of divorce trying to work out profound marital problems via text messages, chat rooms, and their blogs. Yes, if they need emotional distance now and then, and write very very carefully, cyberspace can help. But imagine learning that your wife wanted a divorce by noticing she changed a drop down box on Facebook from “married” to “divorced.”

About Digital Intimacy

Again, this is not to say cyberspace is bad or useless. Far from it. Cybersense means taking a balanced point of view. The lower bandwidth tools can extend your geographic reach, speed the flow of simpler, less nuanced messages to those close to you, and facilitate thin-pipe contact with a wider range of people. My sister met her wonderful husband online. But lots of time online was just a prelude to substantial face-to-face test meetings. A recent New York Times Magazine article (“Brave New World of Digital Intimacy”) explores what’s good and bad about the new forms of “digital intimacy.” Tens, or hundreds of online “friends” can have their uses. They also present new kinds of problems.

There is much more to say on this topic. I’d love to hear your ideas and experiences with these new forms as well. Put them here in a comment, if you like. In the meantime, preserve goodwill and real understanding best with a healthy amount of high bandwidth face time. That’s our niyama (yogic observance) here. A good yama (yogic restriction) might be—use the very thin pipes of cyberspace with caution for less nuanced communications.