After reflecting on the previous human breakthroughs in information and communication in James Gleick’s The Information, I can only imagine the artifacts to be left behind from the early 2000 decades, where the complete timelines of peoples’ lives will soon be evaluated to the same degree we currently study Babylonians tablets. When I consider communication and technology today, I immediately think of the emotionally triggering phenomena that occur because of the ability to disappear in the middle of interactions. The ability to have an off-switch, or a mute button between you and another individual is almost too convenient, and I argue is the fatal flaw of technology today in communication: we are now so tangible to each other that silence is deafening. I find myself both apologizing continuously for not getting back to people while also staring at the “last active” icon in What’s App. It’s so hard to gauge people’s level of interests or if they’re simply busy, and now communication includes a new degree of anxiety that originates from messaging with the fear of coming off the wrong way, or deciphering how a person actually feels on the other end of an interaction. We are left guessing the true intentions of another individual when divided by technology, and slowly we are also developing a new means of attributing emotion to messages and images, down to the suggested meaning behind adding extra letters to the end of a word.

I was left with a bit uncertainty after reading Marshall McLuhan’s comment in The Information when he describes the electric age as a “return to the roots of human creativity” (48). I would argue that the freedom associated with messaging applications is the freedom to remove one’s entire body language from a conversation. Messages have the ability to include direct emotion in caps lock and emojis etc., but they can more often than not conceal. Though a new language for reading messages has developed (where /s after messages references sarcasm, and single-word messages can come off as curt), the ability to choose how much emotion is disclosed to another person leads me to conclude that the technological era is a form of communication that is both a step above the discovery of writing, but still falls short of the creative power available to a person in face-to-face interactions.

At present, I am awaiting the discovery of a new definition of communication using modern technology that hasn’t been defined yet, a definition that encompasses the new experiences associated with technology including ghosting a person, the judgement behind grammatical errors, and the ability to confront another person without having to see them face to face. It is the growing anxiety and deciphering qualities of messaging that peak my interest in modern communication and technology, and how much excess energy is now being spent trying to understand interactions over text that likely may be easier to evaluate and understand in person.