Getting Ahold of Everyone

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And I have a problem when it comes to communicating.

Oh.

I don’t like to talk on the phone except to our listeners.

Right.

But otherwise, I prefer text and email.

I have another friend who only talks on the phone.

She won’t even get on the internet.

Oh, yeah, my parents.

My parents, yes.

Okay, okay.

I have another friend who sends me stickers in Facebook Messenger all the time.

I have another friend who uses Instagram, and I’m still finding my way around on that.

I have another friend who texts all the time, and it’s hard to get them together.

Another friend who only invites me to things on eVite and never uses email otherwise.

It’s just nuts.

And then the friend who only uses emoji or like half the message is emoji, which I’m totally on board with, but I can’t interpret this stuff.

What does the pizza mean?

I’m buying new pizza, or you had a pizza delivered, or you’re feeling hot today.

Yeah. Yeah. We’ve got this multiplicity of platforms that should be making our lives easier, but it comes down to a certain incompatibility.

There’s nothing quite as universal still as the Postal Service, but you can’t count on the Postal Service either.

Yeah. Or a face-to-face conversation.

And who has everyone’s address anymore, right?

Oh, I don’t know anybody’s address. I don’t know anybody’s phone number.

So to reach people, let’s say that you are throwing a party, you have to do a Facebook event.

You have to set up an Evite event.

You have to send out Twitter reminders, Facebook reminders, email reminders, and a few people.

You have to go down to their place of work and wait for them to come out of the building.

Because there’s no other way to reach them.

Bob, how are you?

I’m having a party.

Here’s the invite.

See you then.

Right.

I mean, I feel like I need somebody to manage all of these things.

Wouldn’t a universal inbox be wonderful?

Yes.

Yes, yes.

And we’re not quite there yet.

No, we’re not at all.

Some people have tried it, but they always leave out some essential service, or they make it where you can’t archive.

Like, the thing that drives me crazy about Snapchat, which is totally fine.

I don’t care what you do with Snapchat, is that it does disappear.

I want history.

I want to remember what you said 10 minutes from now, because I probably won’t.

Right, right.

The picture just disappears after five seconds, right?

Yeah.

So this communications incompatibility is not intergenerational.

It’s like everybody’s got their thing.

People in their 50s and 60s have their one thing they will or won’t do.

And God help us for the people who are still on AOL Instant Messenger.

Because I don’t know who’s talking to them anymore.

Is that still around?

I’m not talking to them.

So all this communications technology that was supposed to make it easier is making it harder.

Well, it’s making it easier to reach more people, but you’ve got to master more methods of reaching people.

I’m just going back to Usenet.

I’m done with the rest of this.

So I’m just going to go back to the news groups.

Catch me in alt.folklore, okay?

Maybe we should spend more time offline.

What about that?

You do a lot of hiking.

I do.

I’m going to start going to the beach.

That’s a deal.

Sounds like a plan.

We’d love to hear about the difficulties you have in this modern world where it seems like there are more ways to reach people,

And yet it also seems like it’s harder than ever.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.