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Texting.  A form of communication that appears to dominate over actual phone conversations for a majority of our quick communications need.  A form of communication that has brought with it a wealth of controversy over its use in the workplace, schools, and while driving.  A form of communication that has become synonymous with my generation and is assumed to play such a prevalent part in our lives.  But, how dominant really is texting in my everyday communications?

To find out, I recorded every text that I made over the course of a single day.  But just not any day:  Super Bowl Sunday.  The results were quite surprising.  Over the course of a day, I sent 12 text messages and received 13.  That’s it.  Just 25 texts.  This amount is far from the associated norm of hundreds of messages daily for a person of my age.  So am I the exception or is the amount of time we spend hammering away at tiny keyboards imagined far greater than it actually is?

Perhaps more insight could be drawn from looking at the conversations.  There were 3 main text conversations I had that day.  The first one was a short request to some of my friends for lunch, the second was a quick check in with my parents, and finally the bulk of my conversation was harassing my friend at WVU after his Pittsburg Steelers lost (which incidentally mirrored a similar conversation regarding one New York Jets the week prior).  A trend can start to be seen here, as the majority of my text messages weren’t utilized to contact my friends here at the University of Richmond, but rather those that were miles away from me.  The people who I normally interact with on a daily basis, the people some reason I would need to text constantly, are rather communicated with simply by a walk across the hall and a knock on the door.  Even though the ability to quickly communicate with them is readily available, I would rather sit down and have an actual conversation with them, and the proximity of most of my friends allows me to do so.

It is this preference for personal interaction I think then why I believe that a fully immersive 3D consensual hallucination is not a prevalent part of our everyday life as it is in Gibson’s Neuromancer.  Despite the convenience a system like this would deliver in interacting with those around us, I feel that we as humans, we as social creatures, still crave personal interaction with one another.  Despite the immersion a 3D simulation like this would provide, I think that a perfect simulation of reality would still bring with it the knowledge that that is all it is: a simulation.

Perhaps I am the exception to this norm.  Maybe it’s true that many other individuals my age greatly overshadow my daily texting rate.  I certainly cannot represent every demographic that would have to be tested for a true conclusion to be formed.  However, I do feel there is some merit to the notion that while technology is becoming more and more prevalent in our everyday lives, there will always be the need to meet in person.  Perhaps this is proven by the notion that despite how far we have progressed, we rarely hear about virtual reality.  Instead, the headlines are filled with new means of communication, whether it be smartphones or social networking sites, that allow us to connect with those we can’t physically reach, not interfere with those we can.