Asynchronous Communication Analysis

Introduction “It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them” said the author Ralph Waldo Emerson (Goodreads, n.d.), and I do wish that I could agree with him about this. Experience, however, has demonstrated to me that this is not the case; even one’s oldest friendships can be severely tested by stupidity on one or both sides, as my relationship with my friend Yahya has shown me. I have been friends with Yahya Suid since seventh grade when I transferred to his school. My friendship with him is the most longstanding of all the friendships I formed during my grade school years. From this relationship, I have learned that recognizing the disadvantages of an overreliance on asynchronous communication and
Specifically, we used texting and forms of social media. We relied considerably on the Google Hangouts and Discord applications for most purposes, and both of these primarily as a means of texting. This led to a significant communication problem in our friendship, an over use of asynchronous communication. Asynchronous communication is a form of communication in which “time lapses exist between messages” (McCornack & Ortiz, 2017, p.66). Because we used asynchronous communication almost exclusively outside of school and the specific extra-curricular activities we were engaged in, most of our planning for upcoming work/events and conversation about topics outside of academics occurred in this format. This caused issues for both of us. I have already mentioned that we had a falling out in tenth grade, and this was in no small manner related to our reliance on asynchronous communication. We were both involved in a group project, the work for which had to be done outside of school, and we had to coordinate as a group when to work on it. We did this during afternoons via text. When he, for over a week, had multiple unexpected events in his life that prevented him from working, the other group members and I did not take it seriously and thought he was procrastinating. It is easy to think someone is taking you for a fool
Synchronous communication is “A back-and-forth exchange of messages that occurs in real time” such as face-to-face encounters (McCornack & Ortiz, 2017, p.65). If we had talked face-to-face about the issues that prevented him from working on the project, it would probably have been easier for me to understand and believe him. Likewise, if I had talked with him about those issues, rather than overreacting over text, I would probably have more effectively communicated my concerns about his absences. “Handle emotional messages face-to-face. If this isn’t possible use [mediated] synchronous communication” (McCornack & Ortiz, 2017, p.81). By doing this, we both may be able to prevent ourselves in the future from communicating in ways that can be easily misunderstood or from saying things that we might later regret because of the pitfalls of asynchronous