Our texting is overtaking our talking

We use technology to save time but inevitably we lose something in the process — intimacy, thoughtfulness, even perhaps the capacity to distinguish between east and west on a traffic map.

In a commencement speech he gave recently at Middlebury College in Vermont, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer bemoaned in particular the dehumanizing bargain we’ve struck with our shiny, indispensable communication devices. The casual connectivity of the mobile phone, email, texting and social media has developed as a “diminished substitute” for face-to-face communication, he said, and it has chipped away at our capacity to give others, even ourselves, our undivided attention.

“The problem with accepting — with preferring — diminished substitutes is that over time, we, too, become diminished substitutes,” Foer said. “People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.”

Foer’s comments came to mind last week with the release of a study on the communication habits of the average British household. It emerges that the modern family keeps in touch via 1,768 texts, 520 emails and 68 hours on the phone, every year.

Something like four in 10 parents claimed they are more likely to communicate with their children via text or email than actually see them face-to-face.

The study of 2,000 parents also found that almost half of all Brits confess to texting, emailing or phoning other family members when they are in the same house, often in the next room. Too lazy to get up and go to talk to them in person? Perhaps it’s just easier.