10th
Digital Love in an Analogue Space
My first cell phone had a series of text message templates. They included such generally specific communique as “Be home soon” and “Where should we meet?”
Disturbingly, though, one template simply said, “I love you.” While the phrase may be the second most used in the English language (right behind “I think we should see other people,” luckily not an option on the phone) and while the letter “u” only appears once in the spelling, the many stages at the cell phone manufacturer needed for Text Template 8 to appear on my phone, the pure cynicism and reductionist thinking that led to a mass produced pre-typing of emotion, display the most Orwellian aspects of our increasingly wireless and nonverbal interactions.
Greeting cards have mass-produced sentiment for decades so maybe text messaging should be viewed in the same prism: distant, non-immediate communication. Except text messaging is, by nature, immediate and direct, right to your pocket past any barriers of rings or voicemail. When an impersonal emotional lexicon is used in a personal nature, a sad disconnect of message, medium, and person occurs, and we reduce ourselves even more to numbers in a spectrum.
