The other day as I unashamedly eavesdropped on a friend’s hushed bickering over the phone, it suddenly dawned on me that maybe the entire argument she was having could have been avoided if she would have just picked up her phone in the first place.

Haven’t you ever been texting someone and out of the blue they send you a text that for whatever reason happens to rub you the wrong way?

While your friend on one end casually sends you a flippant, “Whatever, it’s up to you” message—which in no way confirms if you’re hanging out or not that very night—you become wildly infuriated by that little dialogue bubble on your screen.

You read aloud to yourself with a smugness dripping in your voice, “What does THAT mean?” Impatiently, you turn to the nearest person, echoing the message, “What is ‘whatever, it’s up to you’ supposed to mean?”

You let out a half shriek and whirl yourself in a frenzy, wondering ‘what’s their problem?’ Don’t they want to hang with you anymore?

I’ll bet you spend at least 30 seconds trying to figure out the tone they tried to convey, so the line incessantly bounces around in the back of your mind like a rubber ball.

Well, if they’re going to act like such a jerk about it then you’d might as well take about an hour and a half to reply as a retaliation tactic. Maybe your silence and lack of communication will sink in and allow the other person to think about their totally insensitive response.   

It’s instances like these that should deeply alarm us chronic texting sufferers. You can word something as carefully as possible and depending on your recipient’s mood, you’ll never be sure how they’ll take it. Tone and language in a text could easily be misinterpreted for a curt reply, rendering you a stoic jerk or a series of grinning emoticons could instantly turn you into an over zealous, too earnest freak.   

Much like Key and Peele’s hilarious and extremely hyperbolized misinterpreted texts skit portrayed by the two comedians (available on YouTube). They both brilliantly share the misinterpretations of two radically different characters: the extremely laid back buddy and the neurotic, needy friend

Singer and songwriter, Imogen Heap, wistfully croons on Deadmau5’s album in a song called “Telemiscommunications”, taking on a more serious approach about the imbalance of miscommunication, or lack thereof.

We’re so quick, almost eager to hide behind a string of long paragraphs and texts to avoid face-to-face contact. Surely you’ll have more time to think of a wittily written reply in the midst of a heated argument via text, and you don’t always end up spitting out the hurtful things that bubble up and out of your mouth.

We think our lives are so much easier while texting because you can so swiftly hit a backspace button. There is no delete or backspace button you can hit when you’ve got that other person standing right before you. But isn’t that what makes us human?

Are we losing touch with one another? The more connected we think we are with the world the less connected we become to people.

Where’s the intimacy and spontaneity of expression?

These are the very experiences that essentially make us human.

Marge Clemente is a senior English major. She can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].