Mostly communication is of the "not enough" variety. Almost everyone has a litany of how they don't receive the information they require to perform well in their jobs - sometimes because the information is intentionally withheld, but more often because those who have it simply don't know who requires it, for what, and by when, and so fail to pass it on timeously (or at all).
Other communication is of the "just plain wrong" variety. Either missing the point or undermining its own objectives, this kind of communication can be toe-curlingly cringeworthy. In recent memory we had the VC email which garnered massive support for the strike action, and the notorious poster campaign. This kind of communication disaster is relatively rare, even if its impacts are felt as severe at the time.
More insidious but equally invidious is communication of the "enough, already!" kind. Mass mailings - whether manilla envelopes from Bremner or emails sent to listservs - are the most common offenders. Sometimes it's an attempt to avoid the "not enough"pitfall, but more commonly it's a mix of laziness and the absence of nuanced enough tools. In order to reach the 130 people who need to know, collateral damage is inflicted on 327 innocent bystanders who happen to subscribe to the same listserv. It's deemed relatively harmless - "if it's not relevant, they'll simply delete it" - which shows a paucity of understanding of how attention works, and undermines the effectiveness of future communication. Our inbuilt spam filters kick in, and future mailings - however relevant - become the latest instance of the "cry wolf" ending. We stop listening, and so don't hear.
Last week, on a single day I was off sick, I received no fewer than six identical invitations (via various lists) to some or other lecture or seminar or something - without even the polite "apologies for cross-posting" that netiquette usually dictates in instances where this has been deliberately employed as a strategy. Fortunately my mailer threads mail, so it was all stacked into two neat threads (the headers on one of the invitations was different, so it earned itself a different thread). There was thus less to ignore, but as I happily recycled the electrons I wondered about those users of lesser mailers who received six bulky messages clogging up their limited mail space, whose spam filters were anyway less efficient, and whose frustration levels were no doubt cranked just that little bit higher as a result.
Attention is a scarce resource. We've learned to work sparingly with electricity, and water restrictions have focused our use of that, too. Yet we think little of conscripting vast armies of electrons and sending them off to die needlessly in mailboxes on the other end of listserves, detonating weapons of mass destruction in the precarious attention reserves of the recipients.
Of the hundreds of recipients each struck by six such missiles, I wonder how many actually attended whatever it was we were being invited to attend. And how many others, sequestered far from the battlefields, wished they'd beein informed so that they, too, could attend...