Craig’s iPhone is trying to get him to express more feelings! Yet Craig knows that texting, even with emoticons and balloons, is highly ineffective if you really want to understand someone, or be understood, or make good group decisions.
Check out Craig’s take on the new iPhone update. And check out that awesome early October Maine fall foliage in the background!
Here’s what Craig says in the video
Hi everybody. Hey it’s Craig Freshley here.
Three days ago, my iPhone changed. I did one of those normal updates and all of a sudden my phone was trying to get me to express more feelings when I sent a text message. It provided me choices in all different kinds of emoticons. It wanted me to send balloons and put stickers and all kinds of stuff. And you know, iPhone is not the only device out there that is trying to get us to do a better job of conveying our feelings when we send what are otherwise digital messages.
Now I’m not here to knock that. It’s a lot of fun, and useful for conveying certain types of information, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that that is far, far less effective for actually making decisions together then being in the room together or being on the phone with each other.
As human beings we have hundreds of thousands of years of experience in perceiving each other’s feelings face-to-face. We do that by assessing body language, facial expression, voice inflection, all kinds of ways. We are really well trained to understand each other in person. We are not well-trained at understanding each other through text messages.
So if you want to send a text message for somebody to meet you at a pizza place or pick up the kids on time, and if you want to add some balloons or a happy face, I think that’s great. It’s a lot of fun and it’s really useful for those sorts of things. But if you want to actually make good decisions with a group of people, if you actually want to have a high quality conversation with somebody at the end of which you really understand each other, you cannot beat a face-to-face conversation.
