Why Texting is so Intimate.
Ok, I think I might be on to something here. I would really like to hear your thoughts, dear reader. Recent events lead me to realize that some people I’ve begun to text with some frequency, have a much different feeling about texting than I do. I’m slowly coming ‘round to sharing their appreciation, which is changing the voice and tone of my convos, albeit slowly.
The book I’ve put up there is a 1982 novel by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, who are one of the best writing teams in speculative fiction. (I will not disgrace them with the meaningless term “science fiction.“) The action takes place in an arcology in the US, which is a little different than Paolo Solerei might’ve meant, Pournelle & Niven do a grand job of extrapolating some things. As an almost aside, there are 2 characters in the book who are extreme early adopters of a new communications tech, an implanted wireless system. I’m vague, because I gather the comm is subvocalized audio, though we might now see it as “read text,” the machine-voiced system for those sub-vocalized military systems. (The machine speaks, you hear a vaguely Steven Hawking like voice: this is because the neurological system is so sensitive, the user is literally not making a single sound.) The point is, these folks can “talk” head to head.
Remember, in the book’s world, this tech is still so new that the users have never encountered another, fellow user. So the social implications, like those of the SMS (text) system when it was proposed. “Hey, we’ve got a little unused bandwidth here, we could send some user-generated data here, what should we do with it?” “I dunno, text?”
So how do these relate? This effortful head-to-head system has the advantage that no one can eavesdrop on the conversation. (We won’t consider man-in-the-middle attacks here.) They can speak and hear with confidence that their convo is not overheard. They can even use it—almost—without others knowing. Remember, it’s still not perfect, think “brick phone” compared to Android.
And this is what texting does. You can imagine that no one but you and your fellow conversant, can know what’s being exchanged. And thank goodness, as my Nominal Boss would probably not appreciate hearing everything I was talking about. Texting approximates the privacy of a head-to-head conversation.
And see, we’re weird animals. I met someone who said that she’d once put all kinds of private info on a dating site because she was alone at the time, typing on the computer. This person is more than smart enough to know the reality of internet privacy on free dating sites, she was talking about the deep unconscious machinations, how we can be subtly fooled by cues like “no one else in the room, it’s ok to let the inner self out.”
So what’s dawning on me is that this communication is privileged and carries an intimacy greater than I thought. Backwards to all I've put forth here, I equate bandwidth with intimacy, so I’d just tossed off text as this little note. Interactive, to be sure, but nothing more. Now I’m discovering whole new worlds with this paradigm-shift. I’m still not sure how to treat the youth-who-won’t-speak-on-the-phone, that trend still amazes me. I tend to effuse in text, hyperbole is my middle name, so if the recipient is treating text with more “weight” than I am, this can be a bit much. So now I need to work on the internal calibration for this new medium of exchange, to see what will work.
