The trend of talking to another human seems to be losing ground due to technology making electronic text based communicating more convenient and flexible. Many have heard the conversation where a parent laments that their child hardly answers a phone call but will respond much faster to a text message.
The bottom line is that communicating via text based messaging gives control back to the message recipient. Answering a phone call requires the receiving party to acknowledge that a call has come in when it may not be convenient to do so.
The Text Tsunami
According to quick facts posted on the wireless industry association CTIA website, the monthly text message rate per month in the United States as of the mid-year of 2009 was 173.2 billion. That means an annualized rate of 1.81 trillion text messages in the U. S. Kevin Weil posted on twitter blog at 12:30 PM on Monday, February 22, 2010, that there were 50 million tweets per day taking place. An article by Dan Frommer posted on the Business Insider website on Oct. 21, 2009 stated that the COO of Facebook said that 45 million status updates took place daily on the social networking site.
Clearly the tide had turned and the younger generation had adopted another form of communication that was rivaling actual voice communication. There are several reasons why this is happening. Confidentiality is better because others don’t know what you are typing like they can hear what you are saying. A text conversation can take place anywhere regardless of noise, location or how many other people are in the room.
Texting also gives the power back to the recipient of the message because the text can be read at any time. No one knows when you are reading a text message, but listening to a voice message will alert everyone in the room.
How Did This Happen
Email can be considered the grandfather of text messaging and it started the decline of voice conversations. Many of us in the business world have heard the sage advice of, "Put it in an email so that you have a time-stamped trail in case something comes up about this issue later." Those words began the undermining of spoken conversation as the authoritative method of communication.
Let’s face it. Modern technology has come up with a way for people to communicate with others that many people enjoy more than listening to another human voice. What has yet to be fully answered is what effect this communications change is having on our future ability to interact in deeply personal ways.
In other words, as the new replaces the old, is something being lost in translation.
