Miscommunication and on being 'deaf' in the cell phone era

I haven't posted one of these rants in quite some time.  Hope you enjoy..

Is it possible that we are slowly becoming more and more 'deaf' by our lack of attention to those around us?  Stop for a moment and really consider how often you actually practice active listening to your friends, family, co-workers, etc., whilst texting that other person that's miles away, or checking your statuses on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever you fancy.  Perhaps neither of you are fully engaged in the conversation, as you both sit partially muted, intently gazing at the bright screen before you, a world full of possibilities, a pretend world where you exist in varying forms; as blogger, gamer, trend setter, podcaster, food critic for the Yelp app, app creator, Wikipedia updater, and on and on.  There are far more options in this new world, leaving the old world to sit silently, waiting for communication to once again flow from one organism to the next.  But it doesn't.

Instead, we are often confused by texts we receive, unless we practice proper text etiquette (textiquette?), or by comments and posts on our profiles.  Did he/she use a smiley face?  Was that made with an air of snarkiness (look it up, Urban Dictionary) or was she just being cheeky?  This may even thus manifest into our face-to-face interactions, as people respond in very passive ways, sometimes so blatantly that we can tell they haven't heard a word we are saying!  They may pass this off and say, "I'm sorry, I was distracted," or "Apologies, what did you say?" and worse, "What?"  The death of spoken language is upon us, I fear.  Will it be necessary to speak anymore, if we can simply type/text, all that we wish to say?  Even now, I type on this keyboard and transcend my thoughts across the WWW, without having to 'say' a thing.

Perhaps, though, I'm being too harsh.  But my mind wanders to a potential future, where we do not speak.  Would it be lovely and would we evolve into a form of psychic communication?  Or might we all become deaf and mute, consistently using our phone/device communication, to the point that we no longer require hearing or speaking to co-exist, to survive.  I suppose, the choice is ours...mostly.  It'll certainly be interesting to see.  And with any luck, we'll keep that sense, hopefully along with taste; I rather like that one.

~HB

Solving the world's problems one post at a time.