From personal experience as someone who's had a computer since around 8 years old (and is nearing 30), I have to say that I've learned to speak more confidently, especially in less-than-ideal situations; however, I will always be able to communicate better through text.<p>I've noticed this is mostly the trend with people around my age as we were raised during the era where instant messaging blew up. Nearly all of my extremely intense, extra personal conversations with my friends (who I have known since elementary/middle school) were through IM. Part of me thinks this was due to SMS costs being extremely high, but I digress.<p>When we hang out in person, it was only to talk about school, video games, cartoons, jokes, etc., but when it came time to air out the overstuffed emotional closet, it was always through IM. Sure, it would sometimes bleed over to the "physical" world and much more detail would come out through actual physical interaction, but the conversations would always start with text on a screen.<p>That said, I feel that actual speech has sort of become a facade to actual "conversation". Especially in cases where one's in an unfamiliar environment (meeting someone new, attempting to speak in a different mode of speech, etc.), we all seem to just recite a script as if it's a weird vocal handshake to show that you're a normal human being. Conversations through text removes so much of the external factors that just increase noise and I believe it's a much purer, higher quality form of conversation.<p>[Sorry, that became kind of ranty. This was part of an enjoyable paper I wrote during undergrad.]
Why are half of the charts missing axis labels?<p>Figure 1 is completely non-essential and just repeats the prior sentence in huge text.<p>Figure 2 I guess is "percentage of people doing once per day" from the following sentence, which does not reference the chart and uses different numbers than the chart.<p>Figure 3 pyramid plot seems like a fairly suboptimal visualization choice usually reserved for abstract hierarchies like human needs, not for trends and percentages because it has no numeric information.<p>Figure 4 should read "Total Number of Worldwide Internet Users (In Billions)", the growth would be the derivative of this plot (which actually would have some cool features from 2013-2015 and 2005-2009 that I would be interested in knowing about).<p>Nothing is technically wrong with Figure 5, however I immediately question numbers like 71,727,551, rounding them is more professional. Also a nice touch would be to have the names drawn on the pie slices, instead of using a legend.<p>No clue what Figure 6 means. In the world? In the USA? In a specific age group? The next sentence talks about Millenials...<p>Most of the time the text has little or nothing to do with the associated graphic.
If you're going to monologue, I'll take a blog post over a speech any day. But if we need to work out details, let's get conference chairs. If we're planning a party, online will do. Once we're hanging out, we'd better be in the same room.<p>So long as you get out enough, I think this is fine. When you're doing something rational, online written communication is great--you omit all those distracting interpersonal protocols and focus on the issue at hand.
I probably do 1/10th the amount of phone calls than 15 years ago. Overall, the trend of less communication by speech has improved my overall quality of life.<p>That said, the advantages of text-vs-talk depends on the relationship.<p>There are certain people that I prefer to keep in 100% text mode. When they call, their chats have little substance. My mind wanders and I wish they would get to the point. Since most can't touch type, if they are forced to communicate by email or SMS text, <i>they are succinct and get to the point!</i>. Technology is a beautiful thing.<p>But there are also others who I wish I had more frequent chats with. They have humour that makes me laugh and their upbeat tone doesn't translate into text. But they are busy with families, etc and so we've settled into twice-a-year catch up sessions.<p>Overall, I still prefer text over speech. I remember that there were old articles decades ago lamenting that <i>"we used to write long form letters to each other and the new fangled phone has killed that off."</i> Back then, there was a value judgement in that letters were somehow "better" than phones.
I'd be interested in learning the reasons for this trend. Vocal communication seems more efficient than text. There's no pauses between what you say and what the other person says.<p>I wonder if that could be a reason for the decline of speaking on the phone...
From the tone of TFA, this seems to be presented as a problem. If that's the case, why is it a problem? Is written communication somehow inferior to verbal?