The State of the Text Address

As the world gets smaller with technology, everyone is more connected to other more than anytime in history. While you read this, I don't want to come off as a person that doesn't respect relationships with friends and family; I really value all my relationships very much. It's a strange connection between technology and relationships. While we can may see everyone's moves in life through blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, are we really developing more meaningful relationships? Technology has allowed us to be on our phones to check up on friends for details of their lives that may not mean much (i.e. Things that may have not be mentioned during a catchup lunch) instead of interacting with people that are actually in your presence. I admit I have done this occasionally but I have committed myself to avoid this habit that seems to be more prevalent in public. I'm not afraid to say I have done it to avoid things I'm completely comfortable with, like when avoiding conversation with a complete stranger that you can see is ready to pounce on you to talk. Facebook new Android home screen allows this to be done more easily and more often with plenty unforeseen consequences like displaying embarrassing/inappropriate pictures on the home screen.

The problem with social networks are that they are currently used as a mostly one way communication; the person posts a status/tweet and everyone else sees it. In my personal experience, there isn't much conversation in any of the mainstream services and when there are, it's usually one reply (sometimes in a form of a favorite/like) and then one more reply back (it rarely goes back and forth more than twice, even once). There isn't a good way to hold a meaningful discussion through these mediums and that's why forums still exist. And even then, you still need an active person(s) to communicate with because without it, it would be a slow discussion; spoken language is just a more natural form of communication than text can ever be. And it allows much more meaning with tone and such.

While I don't have as many friends on Facebook and other social networks, I still find myself with tons of information that will never be useful or personally relevant and I may never forget them(good thing the brain is a limitless or ridiculously huge hard drive). Though, once and a while, I find something interesting. I don't want to risk the opportunity of what may happen in those acquaintance relationships, like forming into a more significant relationships, so I don't remove them. Even with my number of friends on Facebook, it is hard to manage feeds that actually have value to me; though, I don't think it is worth the time and effort for something that does not provide much substance.

I don't see text being the medium for the future for most of our communication; delivering news content is fine by characters. But why did we move to texting into the first place? I assume because it is more casual and can be done on time based on different schedules but it came with many consequences. Maybe people thought phone calls became to personal and people were sick of playing phone tag. Or the industry of telemarketers just gave a bad reputation to calls. But video chat probably isn't the next form of mainstream communication; it's even more personal than phone calls. I do like text discussions that are more than just SMS/status updates/tweets though, like Google Talk, because it is accessible through many devices, many of which that we are constantly on and has a more personally feel to it since it is direct at a particular person(s). (Google Babel may change how text discussions are held. I'm very excited!) It will definitely be interesting to see the future of communication with the development of wearable displays and watches. I suspect the watches will not influence it much the wearable displays will. It may make it more convenient to chat by voice and could add to the conversation with visual displays (e.g. text chat with people that can't voice chat at that moment).

Any thoughts/comments on this?