Ability to communicate through text has become a lot more important.
Pre-telephone, there was an era of correspondence by mail, but the skills are a little different, I think-- by mail, it's important to remember what's going on over days or weeks, and now it isn't.
Ability to communicate through text has become a lot more important.
Agreed. Though some people seem not to have gotten the memo.
I am much better at communicating through text than speech. That sometimes gives me issues at work. I'll write up something as clearly as possible, email it to someone, and they will then walk around to my desk and say, in essence: "I can't be bothered to read that and would prefer to spend more time getting it in a less coherent form, and also interrupt whatever you're doing." It drives me up the wall. And this is f...
At LW London last week, someone mentioned the possibility of a Google Glass app doing face recognition on people. If you've met someone before, it tells you their name, how you know them, etc. Someone else mentioned that this could reduce the social capital of people who are already good at this.
A third person said that something similar happened when Facebook started telling everyone when everyone else's birthday was. Previously he got points by making an effort to remember, but those points are no longer available.
Are there other social skills that technology has made obsolete? And the reverse question that it only just occured to me to ask, are there social skills that are only useful because of technology?
I'm not really sure what sorts of things I'm looking for here. "Ability to ask for directions" seems like one example, but it feels kind of noncentral to me, I don't know why. But I'm mostly just curious.