EMAILS & TEXTS LOSE LIVE INTERACTION

Emails and texts have advanced communication tremendously thanks to their obvious efficiency and convenience. But in the last 5-7 years, there has been increasing overuse of them as the vastly preferred method of communication. This incurs a cost. Successful human relationships require live, personal interaction if they are to be sustainably effective. This holds true whether in one’s business or personal life. 

As early as 2012, TIME Magazine ran an article calling the telephone a “dying institution.” Since then, landlines and voicemail have become all but extinct. We needn’t mourn their passing. What does concern me is the diminishing amount of live, two-way human interaction. A phone call delivers a level of connection far beyond a text message or email. To continue diminishing the live interface aspect of our communications diminishes our humanity. People tend to speak more harshly in emails than they do on a phone, and most civilly when face-to-face. Having the opportunity to interject into a conversation to challenge a point or to raise a question provides greater equality. Being able to hear a person's tone of voice on the phone, or if in person, to look them in the eye and see their body language – all this is fundamental to greater success in human communication.

Openness to engage fully with each other matters: Human proximity, dropping boundaries, and the likelihood of being more authentic are more a part of voice-to-voice or face-to-face communications than texting or emailing. To an important extent, just sending texts and emails allows people to “hide in plain sight,”… a phrase aptly coined by psychologist and MIT Professor Sherry Turkle.

In that same 2012 article, TIME Magazine writer Jeffrey Kluger summed up his reluctance and passive resentment he found regarding phone calls:

Email and texting provide conversations I can control — utterly. I get to say exactly what I want, exactly when I want to say it. It consumes no more time than I want it to, and to a much greater degree than is possible with a phone call, I get to decide if it takes place at all.

Let’s hope we can subscribe to a more egalitarian society where everyone’s voice and input matters – as well as people’s convenience other than just our own. A phone call offers the advantage of live two-way dialog that answers questions without the need for follow-ups due to unanswered questions from the last text or email. Most important, you had a live interaction instead of sending “messages in a bottle” to one another.

It is not a matter of texts and emails OR phone calls. It should be both. The continually diminishing number of phone calls is concerning.

Let’s keep talking in a real-time, two-way manner. If we don’t, I think we’ll lose something very important that’s hard to regain – the personal sensitivity factor and mutual respect that only live interaction affords.