Intro: I thought I was done writing papers...but I got this assignment at work. Please let me know what you think and if I can honestly present this to my co-workers.Hypothesis: I believe that we are losing the ability to communicate face to face because technology (ie email, text messaging, chatting, etc) limits our ability to interpret, creates a delay in response, and creates a mask under which we operate differently than we would in person.
Email, chatting, and text messaging has taken the place of many necessary steps in communication in offices and relationships. Instead of printing, copying, delivering, and explaining documents, pictures and any other message, one can compose an email and attach anything needed. Announcements are made, invitations extended, and any sort of rantings and ravings are expressed through electronic means, which eliminates the need to form the typical thoughts and verbal responses necessary in actual conversation. As a result, one can remain up to speed on anything without seeing the people they’re emailing, sometimes never meeting them at all. Opinions are formed based solely on personal interpretations of somebody else’s writing, without the aid of facial expressions, tone, body language, and overall delivery of the message. This leaves room for misinterpretation and a tendency for everything to be colored by one’s own voice and bias. The ability to judge an audience and respond accordingly is damaged when the audience is not actually present.
In addition to removing the personal feel from conversation, technological advances have ‘helped’ our communication by giving us time to think. The delay involved in electronic communication is inevitable, no matter how fast it goes. We can take as much time as we need to think of a response and make it better—Whether better means more witty, less scathing, more scathing, better researched, well-worded, etc. While some may argue that this has helped communication, I argue that it has done so only on an electronic level and only serves to further eliminate emotion from messages—or add it to them, whichever the case may be—Emotion that otherwise would be a genuine part of our conversations. Take away the technology and regular talking may be difficult. No delete button on our speech may hurt us sometimes, but it also makes us more real. We need to develop the ability to censor/express ourselves as needed in daily conversation.
The mask of technology has much to do with the points expressed above. The delay, coupled with the knowledge that the person receiving the message can’t actually see you, creates an atmosphere of bravery that isn’t present in face-to-face conversation. This is best exhibited by teenage girls, who now have the guts to flirt shamelessly with boys they wouldn’t even dare look at, all because a text message removes them from the embarrassment of interfacing. Sadly, I am stuck in the unfortunate position of dating in this technological age without the benefit of claiming the immaturity of a teenager…so I am not immune to the technological mask, as much as I may wish for the days of good old fashioned conversation (stutters and red faces and all). The reason this emboldening of people through electronic means is dangerous is because, like it or not, at some point we will end up face to face (at least until we figure out how to have e-families and robot employees) and we will be reduced to bumbling idiots, clamoring for the nearest cell phone so we can say what we really feel.
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