I was reflecting on this the other day. How do we communicate now? What are the key features of how we communicate that were not available before. Maybe it's the combination of the following.
1. Written, using language++ (by this I mean we communicate primarily by conventional writing, enhanced with emoticons, photos, audio clips).
2. Lightweight (it's no effort to write).
3. Concurrent (multiple communication going on in at the same time).
4. Persistent and context preserving (meaning, if you come back to the
communication later today, tomorrow, in a week, in a year, it's
still there)
5. Searchable.
6. Immediate, yet synchronous (meaning, your messages arrive instantly, but (and this is a social convention) you don't have to reply directly if you don't want to hence you have time to think).
7. Mediated (meaning: not face-to-face; although a weak form of
face-to-face is available via video).
9. Global (meaning that there are no geographic restrictions as to whom we communicate with).
This is a fairly dramatic change.
To give but one example of how dramatic a change this is, let's look
at something this new form of communication has changed
quite a bit: courtship. In the past one typically courted only one
person at a time, or maybe 2-3 if adventurous. Aided by social media
in general and platforms like Grindr/Tinder in particular, it's now
possible to court large numbers of (potential) partners at the same
time, dozens, quite possibly hundreds.
Some even automate parts of their courtship process: chat-bots,
A/B testing of photos and openers, GPS spoofing to target specific
geographic locations (e.g. for pipelining before travelling).
On you first two points, I agree. I don't think the effect of the Internet on reading and writing can be exaggerated.
Pre-Internet, the only writing I ever did was when encouraged by parents (such as to penpals I didn't really want anyway) or for schoolwork. I suspect this would have been true for most. And written English was a more formal mode of the language that barely reflected day to day conversations at all.
Now, the amount of reading and writing that almost all of us are doing on a daily basis is staggering. In this comment alone I've "written" more than I'd have written for entertainment in most years of my childhood. Informal, day to day language is now fine in writing, a whole new slang culture has appeared, and everyone is sharing their thoughts more directly in a way we could have never anticipated (for good and bad) - it's excellent and I'm so glad I got to see it happen.
Yes, I agree, the shift from reading to writing is pronounced, and probably profound.
After the Internet went mainstream, for the first time in history,
large number of people write every day, people who wouldn't have, in
comparable social station, have written in the past. Who wrote in the
past? Pupils, students, lawyers and some other professionals. Most,
would have stopped writing prose after finishing school or
university. Moreover, very few would have written voluntarily, only as
part of a job, or as part of education. For the majority of the
population, all voluntary, fun, hedonic communication (in the narrow,
everyday sense) was spoken. This is now very different.
I used to think that writing makes us smarter (because it asks us to
think carefully, to look at the writing from many perspectives, to try
and produce truth, since writing is preserved and likely seen by
others), and so had high hopes for humanity ...
... then came Twitter ... and I realised that it's not writing as such
that has these effects, but rather social expectations (as for example
embodied in the career structure of scientists) in concert with
writing that account for those positive effects.
1. Written, using language++ (by this I mean we communicate primarily by conventional writing, enhanced with emoticons, photos, audio clips).
2. Lightweight (it's no effort to write).
3. Concurrent (multiple communication going on in at the same time).
4. Persistent and context preserving (meaning, if you come back to the communication later today, tomorrow, in a week, in a year, it's still there)
5. Searchable.
6. Immediate, yet synchronous (meaning, your messages arrive instantly, but (and this is a social convention) you don't have to reply directly if you don't want to hence you have time to think).
7. Mediated (meaning: not face-to-face; although a weak form of face-to-face is available via video).
9. Global (meaning that there are no geographic restrictions as to whom we communicate with).
This is a fairly dramatic change.
To give but one example of how dramatic a change this is, let's look at something this new form of communication has changed quite a bit: courtship. In the past one typically courted only one person at a time, or maybe 2-3 if adventurous. Aided by social media in general and platforms like Grindr/Tinder in particular, it's now possible to court large numbers of (potential) partners at the same time, dozens, quite possibly hundreds. Some even automate parts of their courtship process: chat-bots, A/B testing of photos and openers, GPS spoofing to target specific geographic locations (e.g. for pipelining before travelling).