Is technology ruining their social skills?
I never even attempt to socially interact via text. For me, texting is something I do rarely, and generally just as a means of requesting or conveying practical information (Where are you?). I’m glad I work at home, because I hate mobile phones for communication in general, whether talking or texting. I’ll often forget to take it with me (in fact I did just yesterday) when running errands. As I’ve often remarked, I don’t think most young people even know what good telephone service (or music reproduction) is like. They think the crap quality they get from cells is normal.
The point about the overuse of exclamation marks is also interesting. I had an email exchange a year or two ago with a twenty-something whose emails were full of them. I gave her some unsolicited advice to be more sparing with the bangs for professional communication, which she took well, but it’s a hard habit to break, I expect, and as the article notes, some people have grown to expect them.
And as a pre-warning to commenters: Get off my lawn. 🙂
Well most smartphones these days are capable of excellent music reproduction, but as regards cell audio I couldn’t agree with you more. The most enlightening experience I had was when I installed the Skype app on my iPhone and started placing calls using Skype over my home WiFi. The difference in audio, when calling either another smartphone over Skype/Wifi or to a landline telephone NOT using a cordless telephone was astounding. But as you say, we’ve become accustomed to the restricted audio bandwidth various cell services (and cordless telephones!) provide. It’s no different than when I switched from my old 40+MHz analog FM cordless phone (remember those with the extensible telescoping antenna?) to my first 900MHz “digital” phone. The audio quality took a nosedive and has never recovered. BTW if you doubt that you are giving up your audio in the last 10 feet of your VOIP telephone service, try replacing your cordless phone base with a wired telephone and make a few calls. Esp. to anyone still using a wired telephone.
Well most smartphones these days are capable of excellent music reproduction
Not unless they’re hooked up to a good sound system.
And they’ll take my land line and corded phone from my cold dead hands.
I humbly submit that, even if a smart phone is connected to a good sound system, as long as it’s playing MP3’s, the music reproduction quality still sucks.
I still hear all sorts of new things in my music when I play it on a CD, even in my car, compared to when I’ve listened to it at work in 192kbps MP3 with desktop computer speakers.
As far as text communications, one of the first ground rules I try to establish when I start dating someone is “I don’t text.” I DO text, but not the way a lot of people seem to text, and I intentionally don’t have an unlimited-text plan as a result. Aside from that, my phone is tucked away in my messenger bag when I’m at my desk, so don’t think I’m reading it until lunch or before 5:00.
Phone calls, to me, not only mean better conversation, but also mean taking the effort to plan to spend time to make and take the call.
A text that says, “can you get some eggs on the way home?” is a perfectly reasonable and responsible use of the medium. But for anything more in-depth than that, just take the time to connect audibly.
Proud Gen-X here, by the by.
People who have never heard a clean vinyl recording on a high-end system have no idea what quality reproduced music sounds like. MP3s are way overcompressed (even though with modern storage costs, there’s no need for it). Of course, traditionally, most people have never had good sound systems, and don’t really have discerning ears anyway, so in that sense, this is nothing new.
As for texting, yes, I changed my plan to per-message, because I was paying $20/month for almost no use. I send/receive a few a month, a couple bucks worth at most. But as I said, I rarely even use my phone, except when traveling.
Modern storage costs make compressed music storage somewhat unnecessary, but the time cost of re-extracting an ever-growing music collection is a significant barrier to revisiting that particular project. I first started ripping my CDs when I had only about 300 or so. At over 1100 now, I try to avoid ever thinking about what I would have to do if the RAID array on that computer ever fails.
And, actually, since my 1st-generation and 2nd-generation iPod Nanos still work just fine, re-extracting my music to uncompressed files would also limit my carrying capability on those smaller devices (or make it slow to load them as the computer transcoded and compressed on the fly).
AFAIK IINP TTTP TXT ONLY. ROTF LOL !!!! TTYL DUDE…
“I gave her some unsolicited advice to be more sparing with the bangs for professional communication, which she took well, but it’s a hard habit to break, I expect, and as the article notes, some people have grown to expect them.”
Grammar and punctuation are my weak spot…but I think you have a comma OD there. 🙂
I also am HTML ignorant
Texting is nice. I like reading them rather than navigating through voice mail menus and going through old messages to get to the new one. You can also keep exchanges short and text in places you can’t speak.
But… take the time and write in full sentences. Abbreviations and acronyms should be used about as often as exclamation points.