Yet despite e-mail’s rapid spread, there was a strangely lonely bridge moment in the mid-to-late nineties when real-life communication diminished as everyone began to experiment with electronic interaction. Those of us in our twenties, who were building our careers and love lives when the tech whistle blew, felt an odd disconnect as the nation logged on and our phones stopped ringing. It was tempting to stay in over the weekend, waiting for the flying-toaster-dotted computer screen to ping.
When the cell phone and PDA made the scene at the turn of the century, we were set free. All at once, you could leave the house or desk any time without fear of missing the most casual or crucial conversation. You could watch a first-release movie with a friend and not miss a buzz in your pocket from a new boyfriend, texting you to come join him at a late-breaking … art party. And in the process we went from hanging on the landline phone to being almost leery of it.
In Send, Shipley and Schwalbe provide a highlighted box of situations when the telephone is preferable to e-mail, such as when you need to “convey or discern emotion” or when you want to “soften the blow” of bad news. But their recommendations bespeak another truth; bosses increasingly communicate good or neutral news via e-mail. An actual live voice call usually means something’s wrong. Every desk jockey knows the sinking feeling of seeing a telltale extension pop up on the phone screen. It’s the same sense of dread you get when you watch a babysitter in a slasher movie, and think, Don’t answer the phone! But you have to, even if the result is bloody. The stigma of the live call has infected leisure time, too: My friends in their thirties and I don’t call each other as much as we used to, and my friends in their twenties all text or e-mail.
In fact, more and more of us hear our friends’ voices only when we are also looking at their faces. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The abbreviation of text messages strikes home the point that if we spent less time typing each other we might have more time to see each other. As Grish points out, if a friend sends you frequent e-mails but never arranges to see you, he is blowing you off. Shipley and Schwalbe contend, “On email, people aren’t quite themselves: they are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous.” But the real case may be that on e-mail, people are too much themselves, typing well-landscaped little cul-de-sacs of “I just wanted to say” that have little to do with whoever’s in the “To” box. Socially speaking, e-mails, unlike text messages, are more often an outlet for self-delight than a tool to speed mutual connection. And the person who wastes an entire day (as so many of us do) reading and rereading an upsetting e-mail from a friend, colleague, or lover, fretting over its buried meanings like a soothsayer poking through the entrails of a chicken, might be better served to just text the sender “WTF?” and arrange a face-to-face.
Lately, grudgingly, I’ve begun to think that my live-phone-shunning older friends and my terse-texting younger friends have a point. For the older set, that point is increasing face time with the people they already know; for the younger set, the point is increasing face time with everyone they have still to meet. Grish concedes that there are “sociopathetic” types who only want to connect with other “living, breathing humans” virtually—“and you don’t want to get involved with any of them.” But for the rest of us, living, breathing interactions are what we’re texting for. I am almost convinced that textual liberation is real liberation, and not the stuff of a mobile-conglomerate ad. Texts may not unclutter our schedules, or give us time for rambling phone calls, but they can at least lure us away from our keyboards, into the sunlight, and into each other’s presence—before it’s too l8.
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