So the question of the day (well, late night) is: Do you prefer to talk or text?
When I first moved out to Los Angeles a neighbor told me that within the first year I would lose 25% of my vocabulary. “The sun,” he said, “it burns the words right off of your brain.” I laughed.
A few years later I realized that he was right, but it wasn’t the sun, it was the 140 character limits, the IMing and texting. I became very used to short bursts of conversation. Impatient to write or read more than a paragraph or two – unless I was reading a book. Even then, my stacks of books started collecting dust on the bookshelf. Production time and video overtook any time I had to write, unless it was a script for the show.
In business, I communicate through email and social networks…
I like talking. I like hearing people’s voices – their intonations. Picking up the phone and talking is so much easier and quicker than going back and forth on IM, which is a time waster when you have coordinate and clarify messages. Also, talking is just a better emotional connector.
But, there is still a part of me, the multi-tasking part, that just finds it easier to text. I can carry on multiple conversations at once. I also find it creatively challenging to construct an IM or a tweet; like a quick and beautiful haiku. Is that just the evolution of communication? Sometimes I imagine that in the far future, thousands of years from now, we will have evolved with no mouths at all.
Our path is toward efficiency and speed. Writing in a journal or hand-writing a long letter to someone you care about – when was the last time you did that? I’ve been urged to keep a hand-written journal, to connect me back to the analog world. I used to keep journals from the time I was in fourth grade to the time I started using the Internet… then my writing and thoughts just became scattered across the web. Some I can no longer find.
Perhaps that’s an entirely different post.
So, what is it? To talk or to text?
Phil Jackson January 5, 2011
If I’m not in a rush to get the info I’ll text or use other electronic messaging system. But if I need it done right now with little chance of a miscommunication I call. I’m a filmmaker in college and getting jobs and dealing with crew, you really don’t have time to deal with the slow pace of text when something needs to get done.
Marc May 7, 2011
i don’t have the multitasking side and so i quit IM some time ago. Talking is much deeper than a written chat cause you receive all nuances of HOW sb says things. That’s what i miss in written comm.
On the other hand – sometimes its just easier to write things, when you want to leave out how you mean it!
For example, i just saw few videos of epic fu, and i thought zadi is creative and cool, but kinda superficial, because there were no deep thoughts at all (or i missed them?? ^^)
anyhow, this blogpost in fact is very different and i both like the free-minded drawing and the thoughts about the zeitgeist of communication. Just reading the text does not not tell how you mean it. You could be just stoned when you wrote it and make fun about it now. Or it’s something you’re really interested in and you seek for an exchange of serious thoughts :)
Make videos about this stuff!
ps: n your future vision (where we dont have mouths anymore..), you think about telepathic comm?