Can you hear me?

Are your eyes taking over the burden from your ears in receiving incoming communications?

I read a white paper about the world of work in the late 1960s. The times, they were a-changin’. The written memorandum was being replaced by electronic typewriters and computers. The thought processes changed. When writing by hand there’s a flow of scribing ink on a page. There’s more to read than the words on the page. As ink flowed there was an appreciation that there was no edit button. Come the electronic methods of memo production, type was normalised. Times New Roman detached any personality from the words. The number of edits were known only to the typing hand; the work may no longer have flowed from mind to hand. It was a polished production with cut and paste, delete, rewrite. Writing was no longer a natural flow.

We are now attached to a keyboard way of thinking.

For many our first introduction was the tippity-tap keyboard, yet as the years advanced it has been the alluring slick smooth touch screen of our wondrous addictive smartphone that captures the flow of thoughts and transits them into a digital realm to be shared across the world quicker than the eye can read. But what of the authenticity of the words. Are they the raw reality of original thinking just as the thoughts arrived, or are they a complex manufacture of cut, paste, edit, spell-check, grammar-check . . .

Are we gaining ground with manufactured communication or losing the raw originality of creation? Have we even noticed the change? Have our eyes been hungry to read while our ears fall silent? Is the reception of communication being augmented to favour the written word?

Are we losing the desire and ability to share the nuanced experience of vibrating air between vocal cords and eardrum?

Are we afraid of speaking our voice as we’re unable to edit the waves of meaning, things can’t be unsaid once they’ve been heard. Is real-time voice-to-ear communication a fading human trait?

Do you type more than you speak?

Maybe people will discover apps on their phones that may facilitate the transfer of vocal audio between users, and maybe humanity can save voice communication from extinction.

What do you say?