Texts vs. Calls - Human Connection In The Time of Plague
As technology broadens our reach, are our communication methods becoming more shallow?
By Joy Marie Mann
I received a text message from my cousin the other day that I couldn’t initially interpret. It turns out that he wrote to let me know that my uncle, my father’s brother, had died, but that wasn’t immediately clear to me.
The words “died,” “die,” and “death” were all absent in his message. It was cryptic and mentioned things about the “body and soul.”
Soon after my cousin sent me another text which read, “please let your Dad know.” I read his texts over and over to try and decipher if it meant my uncle had actually died.
Should I call my Dad and tell him that I think his brother might have died, I wondered? Should I text my cousin back and ask what he meant and risk being accidentally insensitive?
I chose to call my Dad. He is 80-years-old and isn’t very tech savvy and doesn’t use text messaging – not that I would’ve ever contacted him about a death that way.
After I told my Dad the sad news he expressed confusion as to why he wasn’t “worth a phone call.” His brother had died, for fuck’s sake.
My Dad asked me how his brother died, when he died, etc. and I had no answers to give him after the brief text message exchange with my cousin. I can only imagine that communicating was difficult for my cousin at such a sad time, but the situation still made me reflect on society.
Are we really so far removed from one another that we can no longer pick up phones to tell a relative about a death in the family? With all due respect to my cousin, I certainly understand why my Dad is upset.
Hearing second-hand from your daughter, who herself just heard over text message, that your brother had died must seem so impersonal to my father. You might be thinking to yourself right now that, well, “this is how the younger generation communicates.”
My cousin is 56-years-old, however, much older than me. Bombs of tragic news being dropped like this in my family isn’t an isolated incident, either.
A few months ago I received a text from another relative who is very close to me. She is 74 and, over text, she told me that she had cancer.
To be clear, I’m not a big fan of talking on the phone and I very rarely do. It seems to me, however, that there are worthy exceptions to an aversion to talking on the phone.
When we rely on text messages to communicate important things there is an increased possibility of miscommunication, and often a lack of information that people might want to know. In addition, we risk hurting others’ feelings when they don’t feel truly acknowledged by a text message.
These days you can even find articles published online that are essentially tutorials on how to write a text message to let people know that a friend or relative has died. In such tutorials they discuss what type of verbiage and sentence structures are the most “sensitive.”
I may simply be expecting too much from us in this technologically-focused age, but it is astounding to me that people will spend time studying such tutorials instead of taking time to just make a phone call.
Of course, someone who has just lost a person close to them or who has just received horrible news about their own health deserve the right to process and let others know the news in the manner and at the time that works for them. My cousin who lost their father, my elderly relative who wanted to share their cancer diagnosis with me, they and others are in pain and I’m sure the situations are difficult for them to navigate.
I do still wonder how much potential comfort and life-giving warmth we might miss out on when we choose to share bad personal news with loved ones over the cold medium of text messages. Though putting in extra effort to call might be difficult for people, they very well might end up receiving nourishment from loved ones when they do – hearing the loving tone of voice of someone we’ve shared sad news with can be helpful and let us know we’re not alone.
Lastly, I wonder how our current pandemic connects with this issue. After almost two years of limited human connection, how can we still not bother to reach out to one another in the most direct ways possible?
On the other hand, the pandemic may very well have something to do with our seeming increased reluctance to put effort into connecting personally with each other. Perhaps, in our search for safety, in all our sheltering in place, we’ve become somewhat agoraphobic and too comfortable not connecting with our fellow humans.
—
Joy Marie Mann is an activist, author, and content creator. Joy is the co-author of The Yass Kween Chronicles, and host of multiple public affairs shows, including on The Populist Voice network. You can follow Joy on Twitter, here.