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The pitfalls of trying to create meaningful contact via our disrupted, discontinuous use of technology.

A neighbor’s dog was loose recently. My husband corralled it and read out the phone number from the dog tag for me to call. The neighbor’s voicemail picked up:

“This is Jason. It’s 2015. Send me a text.”

My latent Miss Manners wanted to leave a message of withering condescension regarding the deleterious societal effects such a greeting engenders, but Miss Manners, to her everlasting credit, restrained me from doing so. I was performing the neighborly solid of catching this social nitwit’s dog for him. No mixed messages allowed. Either I hold myself to a higher standard or I have no ground on which to stand as I exhort everyone to rise to my level.

Does the Miss Manners column even run anymore? Merely referencing it demonstrates that I’m a member of a species on the verge of an extinction event.

How many texts do you send in a day? E-mails? Does anyone actually leave voicemails anymore, and if they do, will they prompt a returned call? Will you go to extraordinary lengths to avoid actual person-to-person contact, even if it’s necessary for your work, your avocations, your relationships?

My coffee shop is a crossroads for the generations, from babies in strollers to retirees. Mostly, it’s a favored spot for millennials and their technology. There is a young woman who often finds a place next to me because as a Regular, I have arrived early, claimed my preferred seat, and left space around me for people to plug into outlets as needed. In doing so, once again I have demonstrated my age as effectively as if I had affixed an AARP sticker to the front of my laptop. (Which instinct wins, vanity or thrift?)

From such close proximity, I’ve noticed this millennial expends focused attention on myriad forms of communication, all seemingly at the same time. She chats on her laptop. She scans her email. She checks her phone for more chats and email. She wears headphones, which I presume are playing something, perhaps music, maybe a podcast, possibly a conference call. She laughs at things she reads. She is intense and yet utterly relaxed. Is this “work” for her? Play? What is she saying to whomever she is texting? What is their protocol? Does she ever say, “gotta go”? Will her text partner just not reply to something, and they know they’ll pick up where they left off later? Do her myriad communications create receding corridors of chat windows in which the thread of what is being said is lost? Or is there nothing of any consequence to these communications anyway?

Having spent some time wandering the halls of critical theory during my short-lived pursuit of an academic career, I’m painfully acquainted with deconstructionism’s destabilization of the written word. In a nutshell, the theory posits that in the process of being conceived, written, read, and interpreted, every word eventually will become decoupled from intended and/or unintended meanings. To follow the theory to its furthest, most dystopic conclusion, words can have so many meanings or interpretations that they can become inherently meaningless.

Extending the analogy, how many means of communication have we created that, perversely, impose barriers in pursuit of our work, our relationships, our passions? When is the medium the message? Is a relationship that’s conducted primarily through texts now considered more intimate than one fostered at the coffee bar while you wait for your cappuccino? Do you feel free to say more via a few words on a screen than when you’re face to face with your colleague, your neighbor, your partner? Is your voicemail’s raison d’etre to fend off unwanted interlocutors, even if one of them is your mother? (Especially if it’s your mother?)

Have I lost you yet? And you wonder why I left academia…

I learned a new term recently: “ghosting.” It’s the process of letting a relationship die via non-engagement, a technologically-based silent treatment. The advent of hand-held communication has fostered greater access to each other than at any time in human history, but it has also allowed us to “swipe left” to dispose of relationships that simply don’t…merit swiping right. Would you fess up to having lost that loving feeling in person if you didn’t have to?

A friend from college, with whom I shared much of my early adult life, has been at some remove since we became mothers roughly a decade ago. We were together recently, though we had limited opportunity to gloss the tales that that have been added to our timelines in the years we have traveled parallel, yet separate, paths. I spoke of my father’s death; she revealed her father’s cancer diagnosis. I tried to continue this effort when I returned home, sharing with her in detail the challenges of raising my special-needs child. She acknowledged my email, indicating she’d reply at greater length soon.

A video clip of her former boss appeared the other night on the local news, and I sought it out to send to her. She replied within twenty-four hours, told me she’d Googled the woman and spent some time reminiscing about the old (bad) days. She added that she’s leaving for vacation soon. She’ll play tennis with her husband and help him plan his next career move. How was your recent surgery, she asked. Hope it went well.

She said nothing about the previous email regarding my son, which was the one of consequence…to me, anyway.

She never will reply. And discontinuity asserts itself again, and in this case, potentially for the foreseeable future. I hope, even pray, for the discontinuity of discontinuity, for the disruption of the pattern of disruption. I would rather not think about how little consequence we allot our stories and revelations, made in few words or many, sent into the void. I want to be wrong about my fatalism regarding our bonds with each other.

Write something. Try to say something. Then hit “Send”… and hope for a reply.