The Art of Conversation Today or Lack thereof

I went to type an email the other day - a personal email - and somehow felt foolish doing so. In the age of high speed results and smartphones, I heard recently that email was not the "cool" means of communication anymore - not when things like Facebook messenger and texting are "faster" and appeal to our need for instant gratification. But as frustrating as the unspoken demands of instant gratification are, I am not here to discuss them (yet!). What is of interest to me is the art of communication and how it struggles to stay afloat in this ever advancing technological age which glorifies instant gratification.

When looking back at artful dialogue and conversation, I always turn to Jane Austen. Now granted, her novels and their characters reflect an older age of dialect where conversation had certain expectations for each party. Many of these expectations were between men and women, but the fact is - do we see these in our culture anymore?

The age of letter writing is practically extinct which is unfortunate because of its ability to express emotion without personal contact. Then we came to the phone conversation, which by today's standards is still the next best thing to face-to-face contact (or Skype). Yet the ever popular means of communication (at least amongst the younger generation) rests in texting and the instant messenger.

I remember when the ability to send a text message was so novel and not as popular at first because of the limitations in character amount. From that, and our apparent desire to avoid spelling out full words, we came up with the shortcuts--including our favorites "lol" "u" "sup" "brb" "gtg" "ttyl" "rofl" "omg" "r" and the list goes on. Then technology got savvy, gave us more space, allowed us to type full words, use capitalization and, believe it or not - punctuation! With this innovation in instant gratification, you would think that everyone would jump on the bandwagon and write full sentences again. Unfortunately, this has not been the case (at least in my own experience).

How does this affect the 'art' of communication?

With the apparent inability to use full sentences in conversation (even if, yes, through texting), we seem to have lost the ability to carry that through in our own personal conversation. With people texting more and using messengers as modes of conversation rather than talking on the phone, we sometimes forget the intricacies that conversations possess, whether in person or on the phone, such as the subtle transitions from one topic to the other.

I will not pretend that I do not text. I do, and probably more than I should, but I still make phone calls or, when possible, Skype. However, I think it is important that we not forget the art of good conversation and the ability to communicate with the physical world as it is that aspect of human culture that refines us.