Technology and Communication

In the beginning, we could only talk in person. Then, we could send letters. Eventually, we discovered electricity, and the telegraph was born. Telephony descended from the telegraph. Quite suddenly, the internet blossomed, and we were bombarded with a succession of new communication technology: email, then instant messaging. Somewhere along the way, texting was adopted on cell phones, and its spirit has been carried on by the social media platforms.

With each successive development in communication technology, the barrier to communication has been reduced. It is now easier than ever to keep in touch with anyone, anywhere in the world. But I wonder whether this ease in communication has come with a price. I wonder if the quality of our conversations have an inverse relationship to the level of technology used.

Part of the issue seems to lie in the inherent limitations of the medium. 140 characters in a text or a tweet is hardly enough to express one's thoughts clearly and thoroughly. It's often a cause for misunderstanding, as we labor to cram our minds into our allotment of ASCII characters.

Even when given seemingly infinite time, different problems persist. The very nature of text based communication is rife to misinterpretation by the recipient. If you're like me, you've had many experiences either on online forums, or via emails and IM conversations that were riddled with misunderstanding and misinterpretation, whether it be because of our own imprecise words, or due to the parties' incongruent frames of mind. As many of you know, debates on online forums are frequently fruitless; even IM conversations between two acquaintances has proven to be inefficient and even counterproductive, at least for me.

And so I seem to be paving my way towards arguing that direct, face to face conversation reigns supreme in the land of communication. While I do indeed believe that this is the preferred medium (I honestly try to avoid debates on any and all text based media), I feel that the disparity between talking and writing should be smaller than is typical today. While I'm not entirely certain why this is the case, I suspect that it may be because we generally put less thought behind our words on many of the online textual outlets, preferring instead to fire away in rapid fashion. Ready, Fire, Aim!

The ease of which we can shoot our thoughts into the air means that we send them out faster, and with less meat behind them than would be the case otherwise. Perhaps that is why a proper blog entry is typically more coherent and persuasive compared to a forum post, even if the medium is technically equivalent. More thought and care goes into a block of text that we consider a blog post, compared with what we invest in a forum post, an email, or a Facebook message.

In the world we live in today, perhaps it is time that the medium is the message is replaced with the medium makes the message.