Mail Goggles

A very good friend of mine, who appears as "JMo" in my phone, has been the person I keep in most constant contact of my Terp crew back east. We send texts back and forth about politics and football, we gchat when I'm at school and he's at work, and we generally agree on a lot of things so we have a lot to talk about during this election (and football) season. He's begun writing his own blog, and since we both have such massive readerships, we're going to endorse each other...

My Dad has learned to text message. He recently got an iphone and since I knew he was finally carrying his phone around with him, I texted him during a presidential debate to see if he could figure out how to respond. He did, and he is now a fairly adept texter. It's been great during the debates because we can share our thoughts and commentary in real time. It makes me feel closer to him as well, because I know he carries his phone around with him constantly know. He's one of the "cool old guys" who has the phone that most of his students covet. He actually asked me if it would be appropriate to text one of his attention-deficient students during lecture something like, "pay attention, asshole". I told him he should probably drop the asshole, but that the move would definitely get the kid's attention. I never had an attention problem in school, but I imagine if I did, that a professor texting me while he's standing in front of the room would have been a wake-up call.

This all serves to make me ask, once again, just what has text-based communication done to our relationships? This piece in Friday's New York Times style section talks about Google's new application, Mail Goggles, which is designed to prevent people from sending emails they might regret when the effects of a gin and tonic happy hour wear off. I can say that some of my relationships have been strengthened by my ability to communicate so easily with email and texting. But in reality, they are mostly the relationships that I gather I would have worked hard to maintain without modern convenience.

Where questions about the value of texting and email and facebook really come into play is dating. When you start a potential relationship or flirtation out with texting, when do you move to phone calls? When do you move from facebook to texting? What does it mean when you call someone and they text you back? Is it a downgrade? An insult? And has my generation become socially deficient because we can so easily rely on non-verbal, impersonal communication? I have a friend whose little brother racked up something like 15,000 text messages in one month. He had text-dated and text-broken up with a girl over the course of the month. Their entire relationship was conducted through T9.

Americans born in the late 1970s through the early 1990s have been labeled by many as the "Me Generation". We are narcissistic, indulgent, entitled, and spoiled. We expect to be our own bosses, to be given the benefit of the doubt, to live luxuriously, and are confused when hard work is required of us. I like to think that most of these generalizations are not representative of my closest friends, but I understand how the generation as a whole appears to our parents and grandparents who grew up with a work ethic descended from the Depression era.

How does this relate to our obsession with text-based communication? I think it shows an extreme lack of confidence and paranoia. We are so consumed by what others think of us, by whether the choices we are making will change the world/make us millionaires/impress our peers, that our social lives are conducted with various safety nets. We travel in packs, we meet at happy hours, we screen each other's music and literature tastes on facebook rather than finding these details out through (gasp!) a conversation over dinner. The amount of time and consideration that goes into picking one's facebook profile picture is obscene. (If you are female and tell me you've never gone out with the intention of "getting a new fb pic tonight" you're lying).

I admit to being guilty of every facebook and texting crime that exists. I've had my best friend take my phone away when I wanted to send a snarky reply to an insensitive 1 am text in the middle of a loud dance floor after more than two gin and tonics. I've scanned facebook profiles of friends and crushes looking for whatever caught my eye. I don't know what the long-term consequences, if any, that such reliance on email, texting, and facebook will be. All I know is that I'm sick of spending 15 minutes composing the perfectly flippant yet funny and interesting 7 word text message.