“298 billion emails are sent each day. That’s one email every 0.00000034 seconds” (Tschabitscher). Many studies have been conducted regarding technologies effect on social interaction, they all have predicted that we as a society are somewhat isolated from the world in more ways than one. Speech is becoming irrelevant and temporary; a reason for this includes emailing and all digital devices. Emailing itself has made us lazy, incompetent, caused health problems and has weakened the way we communicate. Balancing is the key to success, without it we as humans will lose all control.
Socializing today between friends and family is now done over the phone, laptop basically with any digital media device. The face to face communication we once all did/done; is now diminishing right before us. Many aspects keep us from our face to face communication, these include emailing/texting, facetiming/skype, snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, twitter etc. Digital media is basically a way to communicate with others, but this communication is taking the emotion out of a conversation. How can one possibly have a full understanding of one’s thoughts and feelings over facetime or text message? Among the thousands of interactive technologies today, the main focus here is the evaluation of social life and how we need to balance the real world from technology.
Society changing has also led the people to change and develop into new ways of life including communication. Emailing is one of the most popular ways to communicate today. Knowing the pros and cons of emailing may help one to decide whether this is an effective way to communicate or not. “Time Management Success,” explains that emailing has a number of pros and cons. Some pros of emailing include it’s free, so once you’re online there’s no expense. Easy to reference; sent and received emails can be stored safely and reliably. It’s a lot easier to organize emails than paper. Easy to use; once you get set up you are basically home free. Sending and receiving messages is simple, they can be accessed fairly quick. Easy to prioritize; you can delete anything you want, and don’t have to worry about taking up too much space in your inbox. Emailing is fast, and can be done in under a second. Emailing is a fast form of written communication. Information is literally at your fingertips, this leaves people to adapt more to their phones because they have everything they need in such a small device (1). Having these pros leads to connection, which is what people need, but is this connection really keeping the balance between us and our technology. Can we ever really get back and reprogram ourselves to what we knew versus where we are today?
With every pro, a con must follow. “Time management success,” also has a flip side to their advantages of emailing. Some disadvantages for emailing include different emotional responses. Some emails can cause a series of unfortunate events that the sender had no intention in causing, but do to the lack of face to face communication the receiver was unaware of the true meaning behind the email. Information can become chaotic and overload one’s email. Emailing lacks personal emotion, as in they don’t nearly compare to a hand-written letter or card. Spams are one of the worst avoidable time wasters online. Spams can be avoided by using an anti-spam software, but they rarely help. Viruses are the same as spams, they may even be worse, actually they are worse. Viruses can cause one to lose everything on their device having nothing saved due to the drive being wiped clean. Emailing can take numerous amounts of time and can cause passive activity in one’s day. Emails have to be checked regularly which gets to be very annoying (1). Hal Berghel the writer of Email: the good, the bad and the ugly states that “The dangers of email do not end with information overload. In addition, the technology itself- at least as it is now being used presents us with a new technological challenge and a social dilemma. Both of these will be considerable importance to the computing communities of the near future” (1). Having this increased advancement within technology today is leading us into further complications of groundwork to our social communication.
When one thinks of groundwork they think of preparations and basic work. To be able to have this common ground between people, they need to be able to have communication. “Many conversations focus on objects and their identities; when they do, it becomes crucial to identify the objects quickly and securely” (Clark and Brennan). In this Herbert and Brennan exclaim that we see the identity of one another within face to face communication. “People in conversation establish their collective purposes and with grounding this changes with each purpose” (1). Everything has a purpose, and when in face to face communication one can establish the acknowledgement towards the other person. When establishing the other person, it is also important to understand the constraints with face to face communication. Face to face communication involves six constraints, these constraints include copresence, visibility, audibility, cotemporality, simultaneity, and sequentiality. Face to face communication has the most constraints out of all social media mediums, emailing has only two and these include reviewability, and revisability (Clark and Brennan). In order to have effective communication grounding in necessary. Many terms come into play when deciding the right way to go about a conversation, in the end grounding is essential and we all want to be understood. To be understood there needs to be balance between the good and the bad of communication. Why send an email or text message when one can simply create assurance by talking face to face?
Speech is becoming temporary and its time that people stop being oblivious to the lives around them. Balancing the real world from our digital world is going to forever be a dramatic rollercoaster. David M. Levy, the author of Mindful tech: how to bring balance to our digital lives, exclaims that our devices have vastly extended our attentional choices, but the human attentional capacity remains unchanged. We must figure out how to make wises choices, and to figure out what constitutes a wise choice, so we can use our digital tools to their best advantage, and to ours. By paying attention to how we use our cell phones, how we handle email, how we feel when we are Facebook or Pinterest, or even when we multitask, we will be able to see which aspects of our current online practices are working well and which ones aren’t (1). Just by us humans paying attention to detail and to the things that surround us daily, we can easily find that we have more control over technology. All of us can become more self-aware, this can lead us to greater attentiveness, physical well-being, and emotional balance (Levy). Attention grows each and every day, it then becomes up to the person to notice what is going on and how to correct the situation. David Levy explains how by the use of task focus and self-observation one can become fully engage with speech and less with technology. Task focus is the ability to remain focused on whatever you are doing at the moment. It is the ability to maintain focus in the face of seemingly endless opportunities to wander somewhere else. Self-observation is the ability to notice how you are feeling, what is going on in your mind and body; when you are doing whatever you are doing (1). Focusing on these two factors of speech will help so many and bring this world to an increasingly stronger balance of the technological world to our real world.
What makes these tools so powerful is how they allow us to connect. To extend ourselves over time, to project ourselves beyond our immediate circumstances; The greater the range of opportunities to extend ourselves, the more challenging it becomes to choose what to pay attention at this very moment (Levy). Alice Marwick explains that “People are showed that social media can organize, mobilize, and democratize. Emerging technology will lead us to a liberating future” (495). This in fact is true, our society today has thousands of connections worldwide and has truly changed within the past few decades. Losing face to face communication is a bad thing and yet it isn’t all bad. Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite the writers of The Internet in Everyday Life, explain while the digital divide is still a fundamental source of inequality on the planet, the internet is rapidly becoming part of the fabric of our lives, not only in advanced societies but in the core activities and dominant social groups in most of the world (1).