'I share therefore I am'

“Texting, emails, posting. All of these things let us present ourselves as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete. We get to retouch face, voice, flesh, body. Not too little, not too much, just right. Human-relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology.”

(Sherry Turkle)

For a long time, I have felt that this text of controlled spacing, backspace buttons and immediate thesauruses (sounds like a clever dinosaur) are like little islands that create lands made of only footpaths. It feels unauthentic. I feel unathentic. There is no doubt that when we are texting and typing we try so very hard to let ourselves show through. Perhaps choose a different font type, add an emoticon or punctuate with a little onomatopoeia. But spell checks remain reminders and immediacy is subject to ourselves and only ourselves. We control the time we can use to craft a sentence. Texting serves narrow purpose and should remain within such constraints but it's growing, has grown, and doesn't cease in fragmenting ideas and ourselves. We're untraining ourselves, we can no longer listen or talk, we can't bear silence, we don't understand how to be ourselves irrelative to other people. We need the opportunity to say the wrong thing, we need the opportunity to be unconsidered, we need to be real. I don't doubt that many a meaningful conversation has (for me), occurred over the space of a LCD screen, but my words feel borrowed and my thoughts, processed. There are times when this is great, of course. Like if your friend has an annoying voice, or if you're in the middle of an argument that calls for google support. I'll admit I've never felt the availability of education to be so wonderfully accessible but it still remains that this kind of interaction doesn't require communication. Lubricants might be a trusty invention for many but let's not lubricate all of our words and experience it all a little more naturally, and be a little rougher on ourselves (sexual innuendo intended).