How Texting Has Changed Communication: Are We Glued To Cell Phones?

How often do you find yourself opening up an email that ends with the person’s phone number. What do you naturally choose to do? Call or text? For most of this generation, the answer is always a preference for texting. The funny thing about it is we get defensive about it and immediately deny deny deny! But once you take a second to think about it, you probably too will confess your preference for texting.

Why do we do this? For some reason we believe calling involves more effort, more accountability, more time. Is that really true? Debatable. But it's what most of us believe.

It seems “strange” to call up someone you don’t know too well. Click the rewind button to before the invention of the cell phone. If you wanted to talk to someone, you just picked up the phone. Everyone called everyone and you really didn’t think twice about it.

The cell phone really has changed the way we communicate to the point that it is creating a sort of social isolationism. It's this weird paradox where we are more socially connected than ever before yet it would appear we are more personally unattached to our social interaction.

Somehow I feel that our generation has developed a social anxiety about making phone calls and praise text messages as our social norm. “Oh, I’ll just send her a text,” we often find ourselves saying. “He called me yesterday and I forgot to respond so I’ll just text him back and tell him I was busy.”

Texting encourages avoidance and lessens your sense of accountability. It is a lot easier to brush someone off via text then to muster up the courage to pick up the phone and tell them you can’t make it to their birthday party.

The movie “He’s Just Not That Into You” actually mentions this when Drew Barrymore is discussing how the dating scene has been dramatically affected by different methods of social interaction.

"I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”

The truth of the matter is, because calling seems to have been replaced by texting, when a person receives an invitation or a greeting by phone call instead of a text, the person receiving the call feels important and makes the distinction that they person took the time to pick up the phone opposed to text. “Wow, he called me to say that he had a great time,” followed by a swoon. It’s comical and almost pathetic but our generation has now discerned that you must be important to them if you are taking the time to make a phone call.

One of the most amusing phenomenons around texting is that the lingo is changing at lightening speed. Sometimes you will find yourself reading a text and you're not even sure what the person was trying to tell you because regular words have been replaced by two letter abbreviations and there is the cultural expectation that you know what they are saying.

It has been my personal experience that the baby boomers are actually some of those who are creating the new lingo, much to their child's amusement, as many parents today have also succumb to texting to communicate with their children. 

You really can't blame them though! I would imagine that it is a lot easier to communicate with a thirteen year old boy today via text than it is to get him to pick up a phone call while he's out with his friends. This is just another example of how texting has become a social norm and has changed the communication chain between parents and children. If you're a parent, not tech savvy and your kid is always on his phone, maybe it's time to hop on the texting train after all.

In the business world, though, calling is required. You can’t escape voice to voice contact. Of course there is email which is obviously very necessary and convenient, but many business owners will tell you that nothing builds customer and client relationships like a phone call. Technology has allowed individuals to be connected and networked to thousands of people via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and it is hard to stand out from the crowd when you’re just another contact sending out an online invitation to your blog or event. Stand out from the crowd by making it personal. So the next time you mindlessly plan to send a text message, why not pick up the phone and make a call?