I think the title, "That Parent-Child Conversation Is Becoming Instant, and Online," has a lot to say. That sentence alone set off an alarm in my head. Is a parent-child conversation something that should be instant or online? I think that the title would be less unsettling if the "parent-child conversation" part was replaced with "filling out your income tax."
The article depicts instant-messaging as a blessing to family interactions, something that "strips away some of the parts of face-to-face communication that complicate matters." This is supposedly useful because "conversation between parents and teenagers could be highly emotional and not necessarily productive." Are you unsettled by this? Emotions should be confronted, not buried. An important part of a child's relationship with his parents is the anger and the other difficult emotions that come up. How else is one supposed to learn about them and how to handle them? In a parental relationship, instant-messaging is a lazy short-cut.
Whenever I bring up the careless nature of instant messaging, I'm often told, "That's not true, I've had some of my most meaningful conversations online." However, can you tell if the conversation meant a thing to the person on the other side? How would you feel if, while you were being moved to tears by this profound conversation, the person on the other end was talking to four other people, saying things like, "hehe got a paper due monday lol?" With instant-messaging, you just don't know.
Another response I hear a lot is this one: "Do you talk on the phone or send e-mails? That's basically the same as instant messaging." Phone conversations have a few fundamental differences from instant-messaging. Although you miss out on eye-contact and body language, vocal inflection is still there. A phone still manages to establish a direct link between two people. People can pour all of their energy into a phone, so much so that they crash their cars or annoy people, for instance, by having no clue whatsoever that they're talking loudly inside a library, which is a quiet study zone. As for the e-mail, it remains pure through its temporal isolation. Unlike instant-messaging, the e-mail does not pretend to be some sort of a human encounter.
According to a series of studies conducted by the University of Missouri-Columbia, the words that we speak account for only seven percent of communication. Instant-messaging is devoid of that other 93 percent, a little something I like to call "the three pillars of communication": body-language, vocal inflection and eye-contact. Any one of these things can completely alter the meaning of any sentence. "I hate you" can be transformed into a gesture of love, and "great" can be an expression of disappointment. These things allow us to gauge a person's sincerity or detect a lie.
"The three pillars" are not only useful for effective communication, but are the very things that make a conversation worth having. Isn't a joke 1,000 times better if you can see the other person laugh? Would you prefer this crap ":)" to a real smile, or this crap "lol" to a real laugh? These symbols are dry, impoverished and often fraudulent representations of emotion. They seem to come from some bleak science fiction short story in which emotions live inside computers and some machine ties your shoes for you.
I believe that a conversation is nothing but an exchange of energy. When we talk to one another, we rarely exchange anything but trivial information. No one really has their soul or heart invested in talking about sports or Professor Joe Blow. These trivial topics are nothing but an excuse to connect with another person. To have a conversation is to dock your soul to the soul of another. Instant-messaging is the husk of conversation-it is nothing but the trivial stripped of its true purpose.