Do text message abbreviations speed up communication or degrade relevant dialogue?

Perhaps you’ve noticed the challenges with texting and how difficult it is to communicate a simple idea, or how saying something to someone can take four or five exchanges. I have found it completely frustrating and completely inefficient. I am sure that you have ever had the same difficulty, when someone sends you back a shortened text; “how ru” and you say “fine” and they say “great, what are you doing”. Why all the nonsense talk?

Worse yet, if it’s something that’s important, some message that needs to be conveyed, it might take 10 or 12 little communications back and forth before you get to some sort of fundamental understanding of what the heck you’re talking about. . In fact, I’ve sent extremely long messages to people, and they return a one-line message with abbreviations that they got my message, and tell me they’ll get back to me later, but they never do. You know, they’re too busy, they forget about it. It probably would have been better if they had waited and sent me a full email later.

Sending stupid abbreviations often kills the conversation, ruins the dialogue and reduces everything to irrelevance, in which case why bother? I mentioned to someone the other day that I’m not on Twitter, I’m not on Facebook, and I don’t text. He pointed out to me that I was a Luddite, and I laughed, because that’s certainly not the case, I just don’t find that technology of any real value. In fact, I’ve always been at the forefront of technology as it comes along, but I don’t see SMS as a new technology, it’s actually an old technology, albeit alongside today’s social media.

Idle chitchat and meaningless chit-chat are worth my time, distracting and deepening the productivity of more relevant work. If you have nothing better to do in your life, and you don’t care, then by all means, tweet and text until the skin falls off your fingers. But don’t bother contacting me, I have better things to do and would like to take my mind and thoughts to a higher level, I’m not amused, I don’t think it’s amused and I don’t need nonsense. one line abbreviated humor to keep me laughing all day about nonsense through nonsensical bursts of laughter.

And it’s not that I can’t do one-liners, I used to be the king of one-liners, but I’ve graduated from that. It’s not fun, especially if you’re trying to have a serious conversation, which you can’t have with someone who has one of these devices. And look, I believe in freedom of communication, and you can do what you want, but I would tell you that it is degrading relevant dialogue in our society. In fact, I hope you’ll consider this, and if you don’t agree, I’d love to hear your comments in a full email, with a well thought out talking point.