Don’t Call Me. I’ll … Text You Instead!

By Tullio Orlando

It’s complicated. The more we evolve as a species, the more we seem to regress in certain areas. Take communication, for example. Many anthropologists predict the end of oral communication in the next thousand years as humans use their vocal chords less and less to speak to one another. There’s speculation humans will no longer have mouths in the millennia to come because they won’t need them.

The modern age has made it much too easy for us to become lazier in tasks we needed to think and act on in the past. Calculators have performed all our complex math for us for decades spitting out digital answers in nanoseconds. Vacuums that turn themselves on, glide around the house sucking up debris and then return to their base once done, are all the rage. Automobiles are beginning to drive themselves. Robot surgeons are performing intricate surgeries (some from the other side of the world, no less).
The wonders of these technological marvels have nudged us to interconnect with each other with our thumbs furiously click-clacking away on a hand-sized screen in truncated bursts of text to enhance speed and transmission of thoughts. Poor Alexander Graham Bell must be rolling over in his grave. What’s happened to the elegant art of conversing ear-to-ear, face-to-face, mano-a-mano?

Mind you, high-tech advances have made our lives easier. Things that once needed an operator, postage stamp, carrier pigeon, or bits of paper passed from one person to another have fallen by the wayside. Today, tap a name on your smartphone, and, presto, you’re instantly in virtual touch. There is, however, a dark side to all this. There’re new rules we must abide so we don’t violate new age communication etiquettes and thereby entangling ourselves in a web of no-nos.
We express disdain and exasperation when we reduce our interactions with one-letter responses like: “K”. This sends us straight through the roof! Are we so busy we don’t owe the other person the courtesy of providing a few intelligible string of words like we used to in the good old days?

My take is that we’re on a slippery slope of self-imposed isolation. Despite our ongoing love affair with technology, we don’t want to be bothered unless we’re good and ready and it’s on our terms. We get easily annoyed when people follow up texts with other texts to see if we received them. We REALLY get irritated when the other person calls us right after texting – I mean, how much communicating can a person take in such short order, right? I’m surprised we haven’t figured out a way to leave a ‘text mail’ on our smartphones: “Your text is very important to us but we’re not available at the moment to read your text. Please leave a text and we’ll get back to you with a text ASAP.

I’d suggest the solution to our love-hate dilemma with technology is a path of moderation. We should consume technology in sizeable portions so it doesn’t dominate us or define who we are. We’re an addictive species and tend to gorge even on technology. Set aside the bombardment of advertisements extolling how better off we’d be with the latest gadget. We’ve already been there and it’s not always that great.

Sincerely,

Tullio Orlando
CEO, Montage Support Services