The Destruction of Society as We Know it.

I have come to the conclusion that text messaging is ruining the world.
 It feels like no one actually calls anyone anymore.
When you text a person, there is no voice. You have no inflection in your words. Because of this, it is hard to decipher your actual meaning. This is especially detrimental for someone like myself. My main means of communication is through sarcasm. When you can't overemphasize words, draw out sentences, or act out your silliness through vocal mannerisms, you come off like an insensitive bitch. No fun. This can sometimes lead to arguments. What was originally meant as a brief conversation can become a huge misunderstanding, or (in a worse case scenario) an all out electronic brawl.

This leads me to another point. What is the point of having a texting conversation? Sometimes it can take hours, or even days. It's ridiculous! Say you want to see if someone will go to the movies with you. If you call them up it will go like this:

A: "Hey want to see a movie?"
B: "Which one?"
A: "Attack of the 50 foot Cactus."
B: "Sure, what time?"
A: "How's 5:30"
B: "Cool, see you there."

That took me less than a minute to type. But in all reality it's going to take a minimum of 5 minutes when you factor in sending time, service strength, and the length of time it takes to wrestle your fingers over those tiny screens. Now, Imagine how quickly it would go if spoken aloud. Scratch that. Read it out loud. How long did it take you? Thank you for proving my point.

That conversation could possibly take forever in text land. You'd send out your original "hey want to see a movie" text around, we'll say noon. But, Jo-Bob (or whatever you're calling your friends these days) might not be near his phone. He might get it around 1:30pm. So, you get the inevitable: "Sry dude jst got ur txt! movie sounds gd still dwn?" But, alas, you were not by your phone at this point in time. You had gone downstairs to google your name, or hulu reruns of Scrubs. You don't get the message until around 3ish. Jo-Bob assumes your lack of response means "no," and he has gone out. He put his phone on silent. Therefore Jo-Bob doesn't notice your text until around 5:15pm. Luckily you were by your phone. You think, "perfect timing!" Think again. When Jo-Bob went out, he saw Attack of the 50 foot Cactus. Now you need to figure out a different movie to see, but Jo-Bob hasn't turned his phone off silent. He doesn't know you still want to hang out. He's busy playing video games, and doesn't check his phone at regular intervals. Instead of having a meaningful interaction with another human being you end up spending your day alone.

Another reason why texting is ruining civilization: Did you read that message that Jo-Bob typed? Where did his vowels go? What is up with that punctuation?! I kind of want to scream at him, but I can't because his phone is on silent. Text messaging has brought about all of these abbreviations and written shortcuts. Half the time I don't even know what I'm reading. Then I need to consult the internet in order to decipher whatever code language your communication has devolved into. It's exhausting.  Now it's seeping into oral communication. Think of the number of times you've heard someone say "OMG" or "BTW" a loud in the last year. Now slap yourself that number of times.

This is what society is turning into. I'm tired of getting "how are you?" or "what's up?" text messages too. If you honestly want to hear the answer to that question you should call me, because I'm most likely going to lie to you over text message. This is not because I don't care enough to tell you. It's because it takes forever to give a genuine answer to this question when you're attempting to type a message with character restraints.

Plus, half the time the predictive texting mechanism on the phone thinks you've said a non-word and changes it to something nonsensical. After you've spent 15 minutes crafting the perfect response, you hit send only to discover this in your outbox: "I'm grwat. Work ie too. I local my me place. You should come view something." It's just easier to respond "good" or "nothing." My phone knows those words.
Bottom line: call me. Let's chat. I want to know how you're doing also.

But, perhaps the most unsettling reason that texting is ruining our world. The fact that most people are more comfortable texting one another than speaking to each other. How are we supposed to meet people or get to know anyone when we can't even interact with each other? Eye contact with strangers makes us uncomfortable. We don't know what to say to one another in the elevator. Instead, we whip out our phones to text someone rather than actually speak to the person standing right next to us. We are too afraid of rejection to actually call someone we're interested in, so we send the ever profound "hey!" message. When people call us we respond by looking at the screen and saying "that's weird why is Mary Lou calling me?"

It's all so depressing. I really enjoy people watching, but lately there hasn't been much to watch. I look out the window of my local coffee shop, and all I see are people looking at screens. Men standing at bus stops, texting someone. Women walking in pairs down the street, but not talking to each other. No, that would be awkward. They're both looking at their phones.

From an evolutionary standpoint, things do not look good. Eventually we're going to loose the ability to be successful in social functions. We'll have to carry around screens and keyboards in order to communicate with other people. Avoiding eye contact will result in some crucial misreading of social cues. We'll never make any new friends. We're becoming a selectively mute autistic society, and I'm scared for our future. NE Ways. G2G. TTYL