Online vs Face-to-face Communication
In today’s world, communication has experienced a revolutionary change offering humans possibilities to do things they never thought they would be capable of doing in the past. However, despite all the benefits that came with these new options, a majority of people support this new aspect, which is known as online communication, while others refuse to welcome it and lean towards face-to-face communication. That is the reason why in this article, we’ll go through some of the various characteristics of each one of them in order to understand how both kinds are important in our life.
To begin with, I would like to start with the multiple advantages of online communication. One of the main arguments in its favour is that it gives us the incredible opportunity to communicate with people from all around the globe everywhere and at any time we want, which is a lot helpful for families and friends that are forced to live in long distance because it affords them the possibility to keep in touch. A thing that was almost impossible to imagine in old centuries when the only way to communicate from far distance was sending letters that took months to arrive to their receivers. Another good point would be the fact that online communication is a great and fun way to meet new people and make new friends from different cities or even different countries, which is a good way to exchange thoughts, share cultures and extend your social circle. Furthermore, online communication provides us with a long list of options to communicate. For example if you feel like not wanting to speak, you can simply write a text to the person you’re having a conversation with, or you can do the opposite by send a voicemail, and if you’re more of a phone call person, you have the possibility to choose between voice call or face call, you name it! And finally, talking of a professional point of you, it is impossible to deny the huge role of online communication in companies and different working areas, and that can be clearly seen in the importance of Emails in most kinds of jobs.
Face-to-face communication, on the other hand, may not be as developed as online communication or as varied as its options, but it has its own special features that I think deserve our attention. First of all, let’s take a look at how face-to- face communication is
unbeatable when it comes to fully expressing ourselves. In order to clear this idea in your mind, I would like you, dear readers, to observe closely the person you’re communicating face-to-face with next time, you will notice that during the conversation, the speaker is not only using their mouth to talk, but they are speaking with their entire body, such as hand gestures, the tone of their voice, the grimaces they make with their face that expresses the emotions they feel, and so many other indicators. All of this is called «body language» and without it, the manner in which we express ourselves or try to understand others is vague and fuzzy. Besides, it is way more precise and trustworthy than the emoji’s sent behind the screen. Withal, face-to-face communication is more dynamic as we are standing directly in front of the person we’re talking to and the reactions are fast and spontaneous, which makes it feel more alive compared to online communication. Moreover, face-to-face communication can help a lot to improve your speaking skills and teaches you how to interact properly with others and feel more confident and comfortable around them.
In sum, I personally have a little preference for face-to-face communication because I feel freer and I have more fun during it. And thinking a little deeper, if we ever get to imagine our life going back to how it was before without the Internet nor developed technology, all we would still have with us is face-to-face communication, so we really shouldn’t devalue its importance. Same thing goes for online communication, and what proves it is the Pandemic period where communicating face-to-face became barely possible but we still were able to interact with each other, to study and to work thanks to online communication. So here again my advice is to accept the idea of communicating online but with moderation and in the most proper way possible.
Written by: Marwa Aham
