If you play basketball every week for twenty years, and then you stop playing basketball for three years, you now suck at basketball.
Same thing goes for speaking another language –if you live in the place where they speak that language, then you move away and don’t use it for a while, when you come back, there’s no doubt you’re going to sound fresh off the boat.
It’s not that texting or Facebook and other social networks are destroying people’s ability to have real conversations, it’s that people now don’t have to actually call friends to see how they’ve been doing or work at having better conversations.
I used to do this and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one
Say you want to know what a friend’s been up to, if they have any news, or if they’ve been anywhere cool lately. So you either one, go to their Facebook, Instagram or any of the others, or two, text or write them a message. Neither actually improve the friendship; they merely keep it ticking over. And there’s way more filtering and careful crafting that goes on in texts and messaging than in what you’d say on the phone (or in person).
It takes about 2-3 minutes to creep on someone’s Facebook or Instagram to check what they’ve been doing, without them having any clue. If that person’s someone you actually give a damn about, get the phone and actually press the ‘call’ button. 2-3 minutes is the same amount of time it takes to call and say ‘I was thinking about you, because I give a damn about you. What have you been up to?’
And on the topic of smartphones, more greatness from The Onion and how smartphones have changed our lives.