The Communication Age… Or Lack Thereof

It happens to all of us. You’re texting someone on a Friday night about meeting up, nebulous plans are becoming more and more concrete, and then radio silence. A text the next morning appears: “Hey, sorry about last night, [insert excuse]”. It’s sometimes intentional, often not, and we’ve all been on both sides of the problem. Sometimes you’re mad at the snub, but sometimes, more interestingly, you’re mad at yourself, as the person who you forgot to text back was someone you actually wanted to see. Why the hell are we so bad at texting?

It’s obviously not an easy question to answer, and, like I said above, sometimes we intentionally go incognito because we just don’t want to see someone – not into them sexually (one is flirting with another), annoyed at them, etc. But there’s this growing gray zone of apathy towards one another, this mentality of “if I run into them, cool, if not, whatever” that is slowly turning Friday and Saturday nights – and a lot of the other days – into shitshows of social ambivalence, non-committal-ness, and passive aggressive text pissed-off-ness. It is actually getting pretty out of hand.

In the end, I think the problem lies in how little marginal utility a text, or any form of short-form, written communication, for that matter, presents to us anymore. We are absolutely inundated with text of some sort of social nature, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, texts, Snapchat captions, WhatsApp messages (haha kidding, who the fuck uses WhatsApp), etc. that sometimes I find myself not even realizing where or how I know piece of information. Our hunched-neck, phone swiping, new-tab-opening-for-a-quick-facebook-fix, digital obsessions have blended the entire idea of communication into a sort of mental version of a Twitter thread – an infinitely scrollable set of minute, increasingly worthless little quips.

But we can’t get enough. We look down at our phones more and more every day, open more and more Facebook tabs at work, and send more and more snaps. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m all about the digital world complementing the analog, and the two living in harmony and making our lives better. What I have a problem with is when the digital world starts to infringe upon the analog (why I have a problem with apps like Tinder, but that’s for later), and when our interaction with the digital world starts to make the analog world have to compete for time and attention. In the case of texting, I think by Friday night we’ve neared an unspoken iPhone/internet quota, and looking at a screen is more of an annoyance than a luxury, even when it’s a real-life person, even good friend, on the other side waiting for a response.

I remember when texting felt special. Do you? In high school, especially, I remember substantial conversations, and substantial joy, being had over text. I mean, not too long ago, getting a text from a girl you were interested in was enough to elicit a silly grin for the next three minutes or so; now, a Tinder notification is about as cool as listening to an old Drake song. (Puts you in a good place, but you’re not gonna tell everyone about it). The double-vibrate of a text is as often ignored as it is answered. Have we all become assholes in the last 7 or so years? That’s entirely possible, but I think it’s more due to the fire-hose of content that we hold in front of our faces every day desensitizing us to what it even means to communicate any more.

When we get down to it, what does it mean to communicate anymore? Being social generally used to consist of a certain level of dialogue, of back-and-forth. (Admittedly more opinion than fact but whatever.) A message was sent, received, and replied to. Increasingly, however, to “be social” is to be a sort of broadcaster – one who posts and posts often. To be social in 2014 is more about being a narcissist than anything, and that makes me sad. How often are the people tagged in the most pictures on Facebook (and therefore the girls/guy that are asking people to take pictures of them all night) the funniest, easy to talk to, or the friendliest people at that party? How often are the people that broadcast every moment of their life via Snapchat story the same that would share those same life experiences with you in person? This isn’t at all to say that people with active social media presences are bad people, but just to point out the decoupling of the word “social” in the digital world with the same word in the analog, or at least its correlation with an obsession of self rather than of others.

I mean, shit, I’d hypothesize that more selfies are taken on a daily basis than pictures of, well, other things. I’m sure it’s at least close. Isn’t that slightly troubling? The faded, nostalgic pictures that our parents have in photo albums are will be replaced by highly filtered selfies saved on hard drives. And I’m not sure if that’s necessarily a bad thing, but, again, it does seem some sort of sad.

I notice I am veering away from the texting argument so will try to wrench the wheel back away from my secret, kind of anti-tech, (Mission-living?) subconscious.

Question: why do we suck at texting?

Hypothesis: we are too inundated with other “communication” to realize the importance of one-on-one communication.

Even the fact that I am calling texting “one-on-one communication” is mildly hilarious but that’s sadly as close as it gets a lot of the time nowadays. I am making serious efforts to spend less time on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and more time actually talking to people, whether it be in person, on the phone, or via text/WhatsApp. (Still kidding about WhatsApp, no one uses WhatsApp). Let’s all make that effort, and let’s start actually hanging out on Friday nights instead of just planning to.

Peace.

— James

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