When Did We Forget How to Communicate?
When Did We Forget How to Communicate?
I studied Multimedia Conception in the early 2000's. I was fifteen years old and the discipline was young enough that nobody quite agreed on what it was, which meant we had to think hard about every single question: what are we doing, why are we doing it, who is the audience, what do we want them to experience, which medium carries this message best, what does the interaction feel like, why this form and not another, and how do we communicate what we want to communicate? Imagination functioned as a working tool rather than an optional layer.
I am thirty-eight now. Social media has existed for roughly twenty years, less time than I have been working in communication. And yet most people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Instagram. I find that worth sitting with. Same goes for Capitalism, around for centuries and which we have come to treat it as the permanent condition of being alive. Social media arrived last Tuesday, by comparison, and already it feels just as immovable, just as natural, just as given. We absorbed it that fast. Or was it the other way around?
So the question I keep returning to is this: what social media did to how we think about communication?
The specific, practical, imaginative act of asking: what do I want to say, who am I trying to reach, what do I want them to understand or feel, and what form serves that purpose best?
The Cringe Is No Longer Private
Over the past year, I have been in several rooms where communication professionals are asking themselves this question out loud, sometimes for the first time.
At a RAB/BKO gathering in Brussels for communications and press officers working in culture, the conversation stayed with me for weeks. Practitioners from organisations across the city, genuinely wrestling with what communication is for, what they want it to do, and whether the tools they have been using for a decade actually serve those goals. The same questions came up in an online conversation with the European Theatre Convention, where Waag Futurelab (The Netherlands) led a session on ethical communications and the #MakeSocialsSocialAgain campaign. Cultural organisations from across Europe, comparing notes on the same crossroads.
What struck me across all of these conversations was the combination of relief and uncertainty in the room. Relief that someone was naming something everyone had felt. Uncertainty about what comes next.
I recognised that combination. I have felt it myself, working with organisations on their communication for years.
When Did Posting Replace Intention?
Somewhere around 2015, the answer to "how do we communicate?" became "we post." Stories, reels, carousels. A communication calendar built around the algorithm's appetite. A definition of success borrowed wholesale from consumer brands and entertainment platforms.
For certain contexts, that logic holds. Consumer brands chasing volume, entertainment platforms, individual creators building personal visibility: the mechanics work in their favour. Some organisations use platforms selectively and well, as one channel among several, with clear boundaries around what they publish there and why. That is a coherent choice.
For organisations oriented toward mission, public value, or long-term cultural work, the relationship often unfolds differently. Platforms offer an immediate solution to a demanding strategic task. Over time, that solution occupies the space where the task once lived.
The underlying question remains straightforward. What do we want to communicate. To whom. For what purpose.
The platform's answer is: post regularly, optimise for engagement, follow the trends.
Across many organisations, this shift leads to a redistribution of agency. Formats shape content. Calendars shape rhythm. Metrics shape evaluation. Decisions about meaning, relevance, and form receive less sustained attention.
The effects accumulate gradually. Teams devote energy to production cycles that feel detached from purpose. Audiences disengage quietly. Strategies lose coherence as original intentions fade from view.
Yet, many organisations continue along this path. Familiarity, habit, and accumulated effort contribute to that continuity. Years of content and planning carry emotional and organisational weight.
Letting go requires acknowledging that weight.
What a Known Audience Makes Possible
Earlier communication practices may offer a useful reference point. Before 2008, organisations communicated through email, newsletters, and direct relationships with their audiences. Magazines cultivated subscribers. Cultural institutions wrote to audiences who expected to hear from them. Letters from directors or editors functioned as intentional gestures addressed to known readers.
What changed with social platforms had nothing to do with communication becoming more effective. It became spectacular and instant, two qualities entirely separate from depth or genuine impact.
A newsletter subscriber resembles a magazine reader. They made an active choice to receive your content. The relationship runs between them and your publication, not between them and an algorithm's (skewed) recommendation. When they renew, the signal is clear. When they stay for three years, you know something's been done right.
Choices Require Courage
Shifts away from platform dependency often begin with familiar questions.
What do you want to say? To whom, specifically? In what form does this content belong? At what rhythm does it make sense to show up? And when we have nothing worth saying, what do we do?
Sustained presence has become closely associated with publication. Many audiences experience fatigue from constant volume. Considered communication tends to arrive with greater clarity and impact.
During a RAB/BKO session, a participant from a Brussels cultural venue described two years spent producing content for an undefined audience, evaluated through metrics selected elsewhere. She expressed a desire to write directly to the people she knew, addressing them with care and honesty.
That impulse reflects a durable foundation for communication. It rests on the intention to share something meaningful with someone specific.
Ownership Shapes Communication
When I propose the newsletter as a primary channel, I am proposing a format and, beyond the format, a posture. The posture of someone who has decided to be intentional. I now consider it the most coherent default for mission-driven organisations, and the starting point I return to in every engagement where the question of digital communication arises. If you are also asking what your organisation should look like across those touchpoints, that work starts here.
A newsletter can take many forms. It can be a magazine, with a strong editorial identity, recurring sections, a visual language that readers come to recognise. It can be an editor's letter, personal and signed, building trust issue by issue. It can be a logbook, a curated selection, a serialised investigation. It can be a conversation, genuinely open to response, building the kind of community over time that no comment section has produced.
What all of these share is ownership. Your list of readers belongs to you. A platform change, an algorithm update, a policy shift: none of these touches it. You built it, you carry it forward.
The metrics it generates are also honest in a way that social analytics rarely are. Open rates reflect actual reading behaviour. Retention over twelve months tells you who your real audience is. Conversion from subscriber to member or supporter is traceable in a way that reach and impressions never were. And an unsubscribe, while unwelcome, is a clear signal rather than a silent drift.
The organisations I have seen make this shift report something consistent: clarity returns. The editorial team knows what they are making and why. The audience knows what to expect. Renewal rates and membership conversions become legible indicators of real trust, rather than figures mediated by an algorithm's logic.
Leaving the Default Mode
The organisations I find most interesting right now are the ones choosing to communicate less and communicate better. They are asking harder questions before touching any tool. They are accepting that silence, genuine considered silence, holds more integrity than content produced to fill a calendar.
There is something in this that feels like a return to craft. The craftsmanship of knowing your audience well enough to write toward them specifically. The discipline of choosing a format equal to the content. The patience of building a genuine reader relationship rather than chasing weekly (ghost) reach figures.
The conversations I sat in at RAB/BKO and with the European Theatre Convention were full of this energy. People remembering, when given space to remember, what communication felt like when it was a considered act. Practitioners ready to ask the original questions again, this time with more experience and more clarity about what they actually want.
The imagination required for this has always been there. It was placed in a box for a while. The box is open now.
Over the next few years, I expect the organisations that thrive will be those that made a deliberate choice about what communication is for, built systems around that choice, and held to it. The ones that continue borrowing their definition of success from platforms built for different purposes will find the gap between effort and meaning keeps widening. That gap is already costing more than most organisations have named out loud.
The question worth asking is not whether to leave any particular platform. The question is whether your organisation has a communication strategy it actually chose, or one it inherited by default. The answer to that question shapes everything downstream.
I asked myself that question in the early 2000's, with no platform to lean on. It was harder then. It turns out it was also better practice.
Adriane Morard is a strategic and creative communications specialist based in Brussels, working internationally with cultural organisations, independent media, technology companies, and mission-driven institutions. She builds communication systems designed to function across every touchpoint, from brand identity to digital infrastructure to editorial strategy.
To talk through what intentional communication could look like for your organisation: calendly.com/adriane-morard or contact@adriane.studio