Communication Arts. Hmmmm, let me think. Has there ever been a better moment in the history of the universe to ponder the art of communication? Or a time when the fate of life as we know it hangs on our ability not only to communicate but to actually understand each other?

And what better place to contemplate the state of communications than here in this beautiful magazine called Communication Arts, elegant, pristine and free from the tacky-music rings of cell phones, animated blinking ads, pandering TV commercials and e-mails selling Viagra and penny stocks.

How is our communication going? Are we saying anything? Is anybody listening? Are we getting through?

One thing is for certain, there’s a lot of communicating going on. Listening in on conversations around me as I thought about this article was more than a little surreal.

Sitting at a restaurant in Soho near our office, a man at the next table is the first to arrive. Not content to sip his drink and nibble the bread sticks, he calls his dinner companions to talk to them on their way to the restaurant. “I’m here, I’m alone at the table. Your seats are here.” Does he not know how nice it is to have a moment alone in a beautiful restaurant? To look around at other people and to not talk to anyone? To think?

People go public with the most personal things on their cell phones, fighting with each other or making up while sharing heartbreaking insights into their emotional fragility—all on the streets of New York.

When we actually listen in on the chatter, it seems a bit sad for all its silliness. But then there’s a second wave of recognition, of the deeper, more frightening thing that causes it. The fear of time alone and the need to fill it with the illusion of human connection. Perhaps it’s the fear of what might pop into our heads if we really had time to think. Just like an addiction, we panic at the thought of losing the thing we’re addicted to; in this case, the distraction that would leave us with silence and our own thoughts.

Cell-phone communication has become ubiquitous, with its own high-volume delivery, and its own argot—“You’re breaking up.” But that’s only a part of the art of communication today. We have the Orwellian language preferred by those in government. We have the empty impenetrable babble that doesn’t deserve penetration but substitutes for meaningful communication from the corporate world. The smiling, plastic faces of news personalities as they tell us about the number of deaths in Iraq. The hundreds of sports celebrities who repeat the same ten sentences in every interview after every game or match. And we have PowerPoint, the “tool” that has transformed all business presentations into narcoleptic nightmares. Then there is the visual component: relentless, banal images flickering everywhere around us all the time. A student in the class I teach at SVA has a niece who can only speak in sentence fragments because she never talks without simultaneously playing video games and watching TV.

Everybody communicates now, more than ever, with more ways to do it and more places. What about the important things we really need to talk about but don’t? The things that all this faux communication is calculated to help us avoid?

And what’s up with us? What about the communications that we professionals create to compete for attention in this stew of confusion? Shouldn’t we have something a little more important to say? Or is the only difference between us and everybody else that we’re getting paid to create it?

Professionals used to be the gatekeepers of mass communication, but like everything else now, it’s in the hands of the masses. We have lost control, just like the media has, just like the government has and just like corporations have. Do we still have an impact on our culture? We’ll have to work harder, and think harder about how to be heard. And we’ll have to think a hell of a lot harder about what we have to say.

What if the future of the world really does depend on our ability to communicate with and understand each other?
What if those of us who are skilled at communicating could really make a difference? How can we get people’s attention and begin to tell the truth? How can we learn to listen differently so that we know what the truth is?

I was shocked the other day by a writer in Orion magazine who described humans as a plague species. But it’s only shocking because the description fits so well. Smothering the world with our own kind, continually increasing in number and killing off other species and our support systems as we go. To top it off, believing sincerely that we are in control and have all the answers. A romantic notion, casting us as the locusts of evolution, but giving it credence for a moment, if humans are like a plague of locusts on the planet, what should we do about it? What role can we play?

We need to think about communication differently now. For starters, we have to come to grips with what’s at stake: the planet, children, animals and everybody we know and love.

Genuinely accepting this changes things. It puts all that we do in a different context, and makes every opportunity we have to connect with people—and move them—a little more precious, and a lot harder to squander on inanities. Sometimes it makes it hard to talk about anything else.