Electronic communication

What we now call snail mail must itself have been a revolution in its day. Instead of having to visit someone who was possibly in a different country, one could communicate by sending them a letter.

These days, I think it's amazing how quickly one can communicate in written words using email and txt msgs. With smart-phones and PDAs, as long as there's a decent mobile phone connection one can send and receive both email and txt msgs everywhere. But is electronic communication overused? For example, in an office environment some people will send emails to people sitting next to them, rather than talking to them face to face. Is that too geeky?

One advantage of written communication is that one can carefully craft one's words so as to convey one's exact meaning, whereas with verbal communication it's easier to accidentally say the wrong thing. I think that was always true, but now email and txt msgs make written communication so much faster than it used to be, I feel electronic communication can be preferable to verbal communication. Certainly when faced with the prospect of a telephone conversation or sending an email, email has some distinct advantages, for example one never has to worry about a bad mobile phone connection making it hard to understand what's being said. Electronic communication is also less intrusive because a phone call demands immediate attention, whereas emails and txt msgs can be answered at leisure. With email one can also say the same thing to many people simultaneously, whereas organising a meeting to make the same thing possible verbally can be difficult or even impossible, with the Cc versus the Bcc field in email headers providing a further level of sophistication.

The reason that these thoughts are in my mind at the moment is that myself and boyfriend P communicate a lot with emails because we life in different countries. Recently, we discussed the direction that our relationship is headed in and whether it has a future, all by email. These are very difficult subjects where face to face communication can be hard, because one really doesn't want to say the wrong thing accidentally. Perhaps because we feel at home with email, having these discussions electronically is much easier for both of us. But again, is having deep meaningful conversations by email a bit geeky?

The fact is, digital technology in many forms is gradually extending its reach further and further into our everyday lives. Geeky behaviour is probably on the increase in all walks of life. When I think about this, I generally reach the conclusion that eventually the human race will evolve into something like the Borg from Star-Trek. All we need is an electronic interface to our brains so we can access the Internet and email just by thinking about it and we we're pretty much there, because the Internet is already all around us in the mobile phone networks. I don't necessarily think that it would be a bad thing either, with one proviso. If I'm going to become a Borg, I just hope that I manage to have better dress sense!