I hate texting.

Well, that’s not true.

Don’t think a text should be longer than 50 - 100 words. Anything longer than that and the analysis, logic and thought necessary defies the medium. I am not a fan. It’s one thing if it’s with someone you’ve only ever texted with, like an internet friend, but for a friend conversation to become a micro-correspondence conducted with thumbs?
No thank you.
Just call me,
or wait until I see you in person.  

Part of it is that I feel like I misinterpret texts and I feel that mine are in turn misinterpreted or mis- or under-understood, but part of it is also that I don’t like looking at my phone and those damned blue and grey bubbles. Ugly.

I could likely use more socialization, and texting just ain’t it.

It thinks it is, some people think it is, but it ain’t.

It is a facade of conversation and engagement and relation, but it doesn’t go any further than the stucco. I can text for ages with a friend about something and feel very much at jump one the moment we see one another in person. It creates memory and purpose and intention and logic and understanding in a very different way, it’s as though we have internet / phone brains that exist just a few millimeters from our regular, real, brain.

I had a professor when I was studying interactive media, I didn’t like him much. But he did give a lesson that has stuck with me for more than a decade now: think about an important or beautiful, or just memorable thing that happened to you on a computer. I could be a video game or a video, or a meaningful email or anything, just so long as you remember it.

Now that you have that memory in your head, focus on it…where were you? What was your body doing?

Don’t post-rationalize it by thinking, oh well, it was such and such a time so I must have been in such a such a place and I had such and such a chair so I was sitting and it was likely such and such a time because that’s when I used the computer in that way, no. Do you have any actual memory of what your body was doing, or do you recall yourself as a disembodied brain that was engaging with a digital un-space?

It used to be that just happened on home computers late at night,

Now it happens all the time since we’ve got phones on us.

Phones bad.