My Mis-(Computer Mediated)-Communication

I worked for a real estate development company recently and became accustomed to depending on the internet and email for all of my daily communication. Call me lazy, but to me, using Outlook was just easier and quicker than exerting the energy to communicate in person with someone. Instead of getting up and asking my coworker in the office next to me if they were interested in getting lunch, I would merely email them. A few minutes later, I would hear a yes or no shouted from a few feet away. My addiction to email carried over to my communication with my superiors. One day I received an email from my vice president asking a question about a project I was working on. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to his email and fired off a quick response not thinking too much about how my email might be interpreted by him. I few minutes later I received an angry response; not only had I not given my vice president the answer he wanted but my response was interpreted to be of a negative tone. Had I just got up from my desk and walked down to his office, or even picked up the phone and called him (I cant remember if he was in the office that day), I probably would have been able to not only answer his questions completely but also do it in a respectful tone, which is ultimately what I ended up doing in order to make up for my faux pas.

I think we as a culture in general become too addicted to computer mediated communication. It becomes so much easier to text someone instead of calling them or emailing someone instead of visiting with them. We text and email because we can get the exact answer we want without having to participate in chit chat but an unfortunate consequence is our personal detachment from our friends, family, and coworkers. Postman states that the computer “has usurped powers and enforced mind-sets that a fully attentive culture might have wished to deny it” (107). 40 or 50 years ago, had you asked your parents or grandparents if they wished that they could have a machine that could handle many of our daily tasks but a consequence will be a certain level of intimate estrangement from our friends or family, would they take it? I’m not sure I would have. Although I suppose that’s how technopoly exerts its control. We slowly and quietly give up certain personal freedoms until eventually technopoly controls every aspect of our lives.