Bandwidth in Personal Relationships

"Bandwidth" in electronic communications is the amount of data that can be passed through a communication channel. For example, with a high-bandwidth internet connection you can play movies, while with a low-bandwidth one you can only exchange email.

Bandwidth, in personal communications, refers to the amount of information that can be passed between individuals. This kind of bandwidth is different between different pairs of people. Some people you can communicate a lot with, others very little, even though you all speak the same language.

In this case, you can't really increase the raw data stream. All of us are communicating through words and gestures. Instead, you have to make these tokens carry more meaning. This happens when people know each other well and have common experiences to draw on.

The Coen Brothers, the sibling filmmakers, are known as the "two-headed director" to actors because if you ask either of them a question about the film, they'll give you the same answer. They can be said to have a very high bandwidth between them. However they are communicating between each other, it is obviously with a very economical use of words, based on their shared past experience.

When you communicate with a person on the street who you just met, it is usually a low-bandwidth connection. You can talk about the weather and recent news stories but little else.

We hesitate to talk about meaningful things with strangers because we fear they might not understand us or, worse, that they might be offended. You want to feel them out before you attempt complicated topics.

If you see that someone is reading a book that you have also read, then suddenly you have a body of knowledge in common. You can safely launch into a complicated discussion about the topic of the book, and the amount of information passed between you can be quite large relative to the number of words you are using. A person sitting near you who hasn't read the book might not have a clue what you are talking about, because he doesn't have the common knowledge base.

Since we are all operating with the same language—English—with a limited number of words at our disposal, bandwidth has to do with encoding and decoding mechanisms. When we have shared knowledge base with someone else, we can encode information into smaller packages, knowing that they will accurately decode the message at the other end.

But bandwidth involves more than shared knowledge. There are plenty of people who have years of shared experience with each other but who nonetheless communicate very poorly. We see them bickering in public places. No doubt, you too have been involved in relationships where there was shared experience but poor communication. It can be hell!

It turns out, high bandwidth involves a certain emotional sync between people. Furthermore, some people have such emotional blocks that they can't communicate deeply with anyone at all.

People develop emotional blocks when they become heavily invested in things—be they life choices or belief systems. People can also get out of sync with themselves, where there own brain is rife with inconsistencies. Both of these things can form a barrier to external communication.

Theoretically, the more common experience you have with someone, the better your communication will be, but it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, communication just gets worse and worse, until you tiptoeing around, doing your best not to set them off.

If you are only communicating a small portion of what you think and feel to another person, then you have a low-bandwidth connection, regardless of how many years you have spent together. Like it or not, your investment in shared experience really hasn't paid off. Now, you have to decide whether the investment should continue.

The benefits of high bandwidth are great, especially in creative partnerships like the Coens'. You can economically communicate instructions to each other knowing they will be understood. The more experience you have together, the more complex projects you can collaborate on, like whole movies.

In a low-bandwidth relationship, you are forever trapped in a cycle of retractions and corrections, misinterpretations and apologies, and the volume of information you actually convey is very small. When you are out of emotional sync with your communication partner, nothing works right. Messages are decoded in a completely differently than how you encoded them, then you are supposed to apologize for how your message was misinterpreted.

If you're already heavily invested in the relationship, you may try all sorts of tricks and therapy to try to make communication better, but they rarely work. High bandwidth involves many personality factors, and for the most part, personalities can't be changed.

If you want high bandwidth, you have to build it, but you also have to select for it. Face it, you just can't communicate with most people in the world. You can discuss weather, sports and other non-controversial topics, but anything deeper is going is going to trigger their sensitivities. There's nothing you can do to change this.

While common experience is useful, there are also people you can communicate with almost instantly. 99 out of 100 people you sit beside in airplanes are dolts, but 1 out of 100 is reachable. You will get a lot farther investing in them then you will with the others.

Invest in a dolt and years later they will still be a dolt. And you will be watching your words very, very carefully.

The 6 Essential Communication Skills of Modern Life

By Glenn Campbell

To communicate effectively in the modern world, you have to master the current forms of media. Turns out, most of these skills haven't changed much since pre-internet days, but we call them by different names. Instead of "quotations", we now have "tweets", and instead of "essays" we have "blogging", but the basic abilities are the same: You need to be able to write, speak, take photos and argue effectively to get your point across to others.

Here, in modern terms, are the six essential skills of human communication...

1) Tweeting. You need to be able to distill your most important ideas into a compelling package of 140 characters or less. Of course, 140 is arbitrary, but the need to compress a message is universal. Some of mankind's greatest shared wisdom is passed from generation to generation in these short sayings. E.g. "There's no use crying over spilt milk." You probably have 1000s of these verbal gems stored inside you, and they guide your life as much as anything your parents or teachers have given you.

As important as it is, the skill of good tweeting is extremely rare. That's the reason 99.99% of the public Twitter feed is crap. A great tweet, like a quote from Winston Churchill, says something ironic, memorable and useful. "Democracy is the worst form of government except for the alternatives." If you can gain the skill of effective tweet writing (which is too complex to describe here), you're well on your way to controlling the world.

2) Blogging. You also need to be able to express yourself in a connected linguistic message of MORE than 140 characters, whether it be a blog entry, email, essay or written report. Not everything you want to explain to others can be expressed in one line. Sometimes you have to expand on your ideas with an organized series of sentences and paragraphs. Most Twitterers make poor bloggers because the skills are different. You have to come up with a plan and a structure for what you are going to write, a lot like a computer program. In fact, that's exactly what writing is: a software program written in English rather than Perl or Java. Instead of a CPU processing the instructions, the human brain is, so you have to understand both what the instructions do and how the brain works.

At various points in your career, you'll have to compose a compelling email or written proposal to convey your ideas to others. If you lack this skill, you'll be crippled. To develop your writing ability you need to actively use it, so you should write whenever you can, for whatever excuse. Even if your blog entry gets lost in cyberspace never to be heard from again, at least you are developing the skills of organized linguistic expression so you have them when you need them.

3) Photography. On Twitter, people say, "Photos or it didn't happen!" and with good reason. There are many things that just can't be conveyed effectively in words. It is senseless to try to describe a visual scene verbally when a snapshot will do it instantly. Nearly all of us now have this capability via the cameras in our smartphones, but like tweets, most photos are crap. If you want to communicate effectively, you have to learn how good photography works.

The skill of photography lies in stepping outside yourself and seeing what is actually in the viewfinder, not what you want to be there. Certain photos are interesting and others are boring, even if they show the same event. In the good photos, the photographer has taken control. Instead of just standing there and clicking the shutter, he has moved, engaged himself in the event, and arranged the elements of the photo in such a way that the composition is now compelling in itself. There is an element of deception in good photography (It's usually much more exciting than real life!) but by adding this spice you are much more likely to get your point across.

4) Video. There are many things that can't be conveyed with either words or still photos. Certain activities can only be understood via video. This is one medium that has changed dramatically in recent years. Forty years ago, you had to be a movie director or TV reporter to have access to film technology, and a hundred years ago, this facility wasn't available at all. Now, it's an integral part of our culture, and if you want to convey your ideas to others, you have to be able to use video effectively. Many of us have this capability on our smart phones, but few people know how to make a video you'd actually want to watch.

Like photography, video involves seeing what's actually there on the screen, rather than what you want to be there. From the same New Years Eve party, there can be interesting videos and boring ones. The boring videos are made by boring people who just stand there. The interesting ones are made by people who have actively explored the medium, made some mistakes and learned what really works on the screen. We can't all be movie directors, but we can all learn to make compelling videos that advance our own personal mission.

5) Public Speaking. As you master the skill of video, at some point you are probably going to turn the camera on yourself and want to say something to your audience. This used to be called "public speaking". It is pretty much the same as standing at a podium and speaking to an audience. Most people are terrified of public speaking and equally terrified of speaking on television. If you had to speak LIVE to an audience of sixty million, with no teleprompter in front of you, how would you hold up? It is pretty much the same when you talk to the camera for a YouTube video or when you stand up at a meeting to give a presentation. If you have gained this skill of speaking extemporaneously to a passive audience, there are many ways to use it to advance your message.

Public speaking is a lot like blog writing, in that you have to come up with a plan and a structure for your message. You have to know where your talk will be going before you begin, and you have to have a road map in your head for how you are going to get there. Unlike writing, however, there is no rewriting and no error correction. You have to get it right the first time! You are also appealing to the audience in a more emotional way than you do in an essay. You are using simpler words, and you are pretending to speak to each audience member personally. If you connect with people emotionally, then they'll overlook the inevitable errors and typos in your speech. The important thing is that it be "real" and emotional, not stiff and distant.

6) Conversation. You remember conversation, don't you? That's when you sit down in the same room with someone and communicate directly with them using words and facial expressions. As the other media rise, conversation is becoming a lost art, but it's still an important skill that you're going to need sooner or later. Technically, you are also conversing with someone when you Skype them, engage in a running exchange via instant message or respond to others in Facebook comments, but the archetype for all this is the classic face-to-face meeting over coffee or across a desk. Believe it or not, such meetings still take place, and when they do, you need to be ready.

Unlike the other 5 forms of communication, conversation is a two-way street. You aren't just expressing yourself. You are also LISTENING, and after you have listened, you are going to tailor your response to what the other person just said. As with public speaking, emotions are important, but in conversation you aren't just pretending to connect with the audience, you are actually doing it. You aren't just listening to the other person's words; you are trying to read the emotions and subtext behind the words. There's a lot more to conversation than we can possibly review here, but like the other skills, the more you do it, the better you'll get at it.


All of these 6 communication skills require a certain detachment. Frankly, most people are terrible at these skills—all of them!—and that's because they are so enmeshed in their own needs that they can't see the needs of others. They tweet exactly what they think and photograph exactly what they see without trying to understand how someone else is going to receive it. Good communication, in any medium, means stepping outside yourself and seeing what the audience does. Most people are so trapped in narcissism that they can't pull it off. They "communicate" only in the most rudimentary sense—like a barking dog or squawking bird—and they are unlikely to sway anyone to their viewpoint.

You will communicate better by switching off your narcissism and looking at your output as though it was the product of someone else. Would this be a compelling photo, tweet or blog entry if you stumbled upon it at random with no idea who produced it? If so, then you have probably created a good one. If not, you've still got work to do.