Electronic communication: What gets lost when we become too discreet?

Yesterday while running, I listened to yet another discussion on NPR sparked by the article in the Sunday New York Times Style section earlier this month in which a large photo depicted a family of four, all sitting together on a couch but each engaged individually with some form of electronic equipment. Again and again, the question seemed to circle back to this one: Okay, this family is all wired in and focusing on their individual online activities, but what exactly has been lost, if anything?

Well, most adults who remember a time when communication was primarily non-electronic can answer this somewhat by rote. Electronic communication – whether email, Tweets, or blogs – lack the nuance of spoken interaction. Humor and other aspects of emotion get lost in translation. The very reason for emoticons is to try to bridge the difficulty in conveying intonation and inference through the on-screen, printed word. We craft keyboard characters into smiles, winks and frowns just in case what would have come through in our voices were we speaking gets lost in the written word.

But it occurred to me as I listened to the discussion that there’s another aspect to it as well. Many of us have learned the hard way -- through personal experience, retold anecdotes, or stories raised to the level of urban myth -- that tact and vigilance are necessary when writing emails and other forms of electronic correspondence. In short, it’s dangerous to commit anything to any electronic medium if you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing it enter viral distribution.

Which is a fine message as far as reminding people to exercise tact, but prompts a corollary question: So if we’re all communicating electronically, what happens to all the discussions we dare not have through the written word?

This is not an abstraction to me. One evening last week, I stopped by the public library to return a book and ran into my friends Amy and Jean. Jean and I got caught up in a discussion about something that had happened in our third-graders’ circle of friends; Amy countered with a story about her kindergartener and a classmate; and soon the three of us, whispering next to the reference desk, were sharing the kind of personal stories about our own pasts that girls normally tell only after midnight at slumber parties.

The reference librarian didn’t bat an eye as the three of us went on and on about awkward moments and painful heartbreaks from our middle school years, but I found myself still thinking about the conversation the next day. First of all, it just seemed so random. I don’t know either of them really well; had we not run into each other, all of us without kids or husbands, on this particular evening under these particular circumstances, we probably never would have shared any of those stories.

But more importantly, it was only through face-to-face interaction that a conversation like that would have happened; these certainly weren’t anecdotes you’d want to commit to written form.

So maybe, I though as I listened to the NPR discussion about cyber-intimacy, that’s what’s being lost: crazy random personal chit-chat among friends. Amy and Jean and I can certainly arrange a carpool or recruit art show volunteers by email, but confess as to the most embarrassing moment we remember from middle school? Not likely. Not in the least.

On the one hand, it’s a positive thing if electronic communication is starting to get old and familiar enough that fewer privacy faux pas are taking place. (Having discovered that my own 8-year-old sent an email containing an unkind sentiment about a classmate to six friends last month, I know firsthand that the principle of not writing incriminating emails is something that can’t be taught early enough.) On the other, if we’re learning to avoid potentially embarrassing stories or confessions in our electronic communications, and electronic communications are all we’re using, we’re passing up the chance for moments like the one I had at the library last week.

Talking about personal moments with casual friends isn’t an everyday occurrence for me, but it has led to some of my most interesting insights – and, of course, sharing an intimate story is a great way to fortify a budding friendship. So yes, something will potentially be lost if we get into the habit of passing up the chance for face-to-face discussion. I need only remember last week at the library – and the delicious feeling of kinship with two friends that transpired there – to understand how true this is.

Tim telecommunicates

You know those times when a name pops up in the “from” column of your e-mail directory that makes you do a double-take? That happened to me yesterday. It wasn’t the name of a high school nemesis or a long-forgotten co-worker. It was my son Tim.

An e-mail from Tim? I thought to myself. It didn’t quite compute. I was at my desk beginning the last hour of my workday, and Tim was at school. Sure, I knew he had the capability of sending me e-mail; I was the one who had set up his account, just last weekend. I wasn’t really thinking at the time about how he would use it: mostly to send notes to his close friend who goes to a different school, I figured.

It didn’t occur to me that he might write to me. But when I opened the e-mail, I realized he had just gotten out of school for the day and was writing to me from the public library, his usual afterschool destination, to confirm with me what time I would pick him up there. How convenient, I thought. In the past, we’ve always had to finalize a pickup plan before he leaves for the bus at 7:30 in the morning. Now I was free to alter the plan just thirty minutes out, because Tim happened to be on e-mail and happened to have written to me.

We’re behind most families we know in terms of telecommunications and children. Most of Tim’s classmates have not only e-mail accounts but also cell phones, text-messaging capability and Facebook status. Last week when there were no computers available at the library for afterschool research, he and a friend pulled up Wikipedia on his friend’s iTouch. They’re all light years ahead of us. I’m still accustomed to making plans with Tim the old-fashioned way: deciding first thing in the morning when and where I’ll pick him up, and making it clear that he’d better be there.

But now he has e-mail, and in the very near future he’s likely to get his first cell phone, only because my husband needs an upgrade so probably each one of us will move one step up (I’ll get Rick’s outgrown one, which has advantages over mine in that it’s a flip phone and takes pictures, and Tim will get mine). This won’t exactly open up a world of technology to him: I have what I call the old-fashioned kind of cell phone, meaning all it does is make calls, and even those we pay 25 cents a minute for. Texting, not to mention the newer variations thereupon, won’t be an issue with my clunky old circa 2002 Nokia.

Objectively, it makes sense to me for Tim to have his own phone at this point. Like a lot of kids in our town, he likes to go to the library after school dismissal: he does his homework (that’s the rule if he’s not going to come straight home), then plays computer games for a little while and, as of yesterday, apparently checks his e-mail. I generally swing by to pick him up at the library an hour or so after school dismissal. It’s a casual plan that has worked well for the first two months of school.

Still, it will be a little easier once we can reach each other by phone to change or confirm pickup times. But I worry a little bit, with the phone and even the e-mail, that once I have the capability to track him down electronically, it will just become a problem for me when I can’t. If I rely on him to check his e-mail after school for changes in the pick-up plan, what if one day he doesn’t happen to want to check e-mail? As for the phone, I’ve reminded him several times that ringing cell phones are forbidden at both the library and at school, which means he’ll never embarrass himself by having it go off when it’s not supposed to, but it also means he’ll end up using it only when he wishes to turn it on. I can leave him a voicemail…but will he remember, or care, to check voicemail?

There’s no question that enhanced means of communication with Tim will be both an advantage and a disadvantage. During mild weather, he rides his bike to school and home. That’s definitely a situation in which I’ll feel a little better if he has a phone. But I can’t help thinking that providing ourselves with more agents of communication means simultaneously opening up the possibility of less communication, or at least proportionately less given the possibilities that will exist. What if I e-mail him, call him, and voicemail him – and he doesn’t respond? Won’t that leave me a lot more worried than if I didn’t have any way to get in touch in the first place?

We’ll get used to it, I’m sure. We’ll figure it out. Every other family does. But it’s still new to us, and I have no doubt it will take us some time to work out the details.