Technology, cellphones in particular, has allowed us to be available from almost anywhere at any time. All it takes is the touch of a button and we could be talking to someone from the other side of the world. You no longer have to write letters or meet someone face-to-face to communicate with them.
Getting a flat tire while driving means someone usually has to be called for assistance, but that option wasn’t always available. Before having a cellphone in the car, people would have to wait on the road until help came. Once someone stopped, there was a connection that happened between the two people because they were forced to interact face-to-face.
Beginning in the 1940s, phones were connected to cars so calls no longer had to be made from a landline or a public phone. To make things more convenient, the personal telephone was introduced by Motorola in 1989.
According to “The History of Mobile Phones” from The Washington Post, “With a collapsible antennae and a flip-close design that was reminiscent of the communicators used in the ‘Star Trek’ TV series, the Micro Tac was deemed the first truly portable phone and launched the consumer segment of cellphone use.”
Cellphones give us the ability to communicate with each other from almost anywhere in the world. Not having a cellphone all the time “gives you access to things you never would have been forced to understand or explore and makes you consider things about yourself that you never would have been forced to explore,” said Mara Berkland, professor of communication.
Generally, people aren’t usually jumping at the chance to talk to someone in person. Instead, they have the comfort of hiding behind a screen and being able to process and think about what to say before actually saying it.
Texting, emailing, phone calls and social media can all affect communication skills. People no longer have to look something up in a library or ask someone for input when they have a question. At just the touch of a finger, almost any information can be found online. Being able to research online was a big development in technology because it became significantly easier to do research.
With the rise of social media and the ease of online communication, new kinds of relationships have been created. People are now able to ask questions online and chances are, there is some group chat talking about the same topic. On social media, people may become friends without ever speaking or meeting each other in real life, when the entire relationship is via messaging.
The danger with this sort of relationship is that it can be hard to know whether the person is who they really say they are. Technology has made many people careful about who and what they trust on the internet.
With all the access available online, people don’t have to leave their house nearly as much as they would have had to in the past. Almost everything can be delivered to the house. This means that people lose interactions they once had in malls, restaurants, grocery stores and for some, school.
“Identity exists when we are pulled into it by other people. Someone in person is not the same as over phone,” said Berkland. “Physically the same person, cognitively the same person but I don’t have the luxury of talking the same, acting the same, sitting the same, being the same.”
For those who have grown up always having technology around, it can seem impossible to imagine a world without it. Technology feels so natural and normal to the younger generations that they may not even think twice about using their phones for the simplest tasks.
According to “The Fate of Online trust in the Next Decade” by the Pew Research Center, “the internet will be so ubiquitous that it will be like the air we breathe: Bad some days, good others, but not something we consciously interrogate anymore.”
Apart from verbal communication being disturbed by technology, writing skills have also been affected. A whole new medium of writing has been created with computers and phones. Many schools are giving the option to have iPads and laptops in class for students to take notes on.
The same issue arises with spelling and grammar. We get out of the practice of writing out words and having to know from memory how they are spelled. When typing, there are programs that can instantly detect when a word is spelled wrong or a comma is misplaced. People get so used to using these tools that they forget how to do it themselves.
A new type of language has even been established. To make life more simple, words have been abbreviated so that texting is even faster. With students bringing these new types of words into the classrooms, teachers may have to re-examine the definition of “standard writing.”
“I think it’s because the majority of writing they do is on Twitter or is in the form of text messages or internet relay chat messages, where what matters is what you’re saying not so much the actual grammatical rules,” said Steve Macek, professor of communication.
The typewriter was the start of being able to write at a much faster pace. When typewriters were in use, mistakes couldn’t easily be erased. Now, people can go back and fix typos or change the original writing. With all the help that comes from technology, a high standard is held to have correct and accurate information written. The word abbreviations that have been created are a way to increase the speed of typing even more.
There are both positive and negative aspects to technology’s effect on communication. It can be a distraction but also such a norm to be constantly checking our phones. When in the same room as someone it can be almost impossible to not glace at your phone at some point. Because we have this access to anything and everything at any moment, it can be difficult to not be updated instantly about something.
“In many ways, this device or media which should open up the world to us, has absolutely closed the world to us because of how it is we use it to keep ourselves from feeling any level of discomfort,” said Berkland.
