With the ever-increasing amount of technology in our lives, the gap between the people embracing new technology and the people who would rather keep what they know seems to be getting bigger and bigger. The younger generation has started embracing things like Facebook, MySpace, text messaging, and Twitter, while (generally speaking) the older generation is still sort of getting comfortable with their cell phones.
Anyone who has ever watched 13 year olds use their phones to text their friends, it becomes pretty clear that they are entirely comfortable with their phone, and it’s almost an extension of their arm. It seems as though they use text messaging as a form of communication, just like all others. I know that as a Computer Science major, I’m just as, if not more so, comfortable communicating via a text based medium than I am via voice (face to face conversation, or a phone conversation), unless it’s someone I know really, really well. However, if I send my dad a text message, he would rather call me back than respond via the same medium.
That said, if I send a text message to my younger sister, she not only responds very rapidly, she also texts in a very similar tone to the way she speaks. Arguably my younger sister (and others her age, clearly) are using the technology in a much more fluid way. It seems as though the younger generations use means of communication all mostly equally, in that they’re perfectly willing to text instead of talk on the phone, or read people’s Twitter feeds instead of calling and asking what’s going on in someone’s life.
This is in stark contrast to older generations, where it seems as though even those who are comfortable with using technology as a means of communication, are still a little bit uncomfortable. For instance, it’s fairly common to see email from a parent, or older friend/co-worker that address three or four different topics, each in their own separate paragraph. This is standard “writing procedure”, but it makes replying less fluid, less conversational.
It seems that the core issues here are two-fold. First, it seems like there is an inherent discomfort around technology in older generations. Not that older generations are afraid, or not willing to try, or even that they don’t understand proper usage or “netiquette”. It seems to be that older generations write email or text messages in a formal, forced way. Perhaps it’s that email and text-based forms of communication in general were introduced as a professional communication tool first, and become more personal second. Perhaps it’s just that older generations are forcing themselves to use something that they feel mildly uncomfortable with, even though they know they shouldn’t.
Second, and this may be the more predominant reason that conversations via technology feel stilted, it may be that technology is just missing something crucial to the fluidity of voice conversation. Clearly technology has made great strides in the past 10 or 15 years, but it may be that we haven’t yet perfected the requisite concept to imitate natural conversation. It may be that younger generations (and Computer Science-type people) force their way past the fundamental flaw in the means of communication, when there could very well be ways to better optimize the communication experience to make the entire interaction more fulfilling and fluid.
Now, obviously this is mostly conjecture, and it would take knowledge about psychology, and studies, and all sorts of other things to figure out what the root cause of the disparity between acceptance of new communications media is. I’m more inclined to think that the technology itself is missing something crucial, and that there’s a better way to communicate that has yet to be discovered. I like to think that technology can and should be used to it’s fullest potential, and that this means making it as accessible to everyone as possible.
