COMMUNICATIONS: A digitally-mediated mess

Do you find yourself texting someone before you try to call them, or sending an email to a professor, versus going to the office for a face-to-face conversation? Such habits are practices of digitally mediated communications.

Today, we communicate with our fingers on a keypad and our noses pressed against a smart phone or a computer screen. The way we communicate is challenging how we interact in social and professional settings.

In his book, “The Changing Nature of Text,” Linguistics scholar David Crystal explains the differences between speech and writing. When you’re speaking with a person, you can hear the tone of their voice, and understand what they are trying to say by how they say it.

But, when you receive a message from someone in email or text, how you interpret his or her words can be completely different. Writing carries a separate meaning, and you’re often not able to communicate the same feeling as you would in a normal spoken conversation.

This is because speech is time-bound; making conversation a live and active balance between listening and speaking. Text, however, is space-bound; it’s mediated by a device and is limited when body language and tone-of-voice are filtered out.

Emails don’t cost anything, and texts are marginal fractions of a cent with most messaging plans. This is why many companies and customer service outlets are phasing out their live-service hotlines in favor of customer-filed email forms.

Customer service agents and public relations professionals are afforded the opportunity to respond to questions at their convenience. They can filter out the interruptions that occur in a spoken conversation, limiting what questions you can ask, and what answers you’re going to get back.

The problem this creates is that customers can still use a live service-hot line option —for a price.  Digitally mediated communications offers only one static response at a time, but if you have the funds, you can pay to ask a real person more questions.

Because talking is a basic form of communication, it’s an ironic and novel concept that speaking to a representative is now a marketable commodity.