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 from IT people, who should know better.
I would like to blame the culture of phone messaging and twitter for getting people discombobulated whenever they encounter more than a few lines of text, but I'm actually not sure what the cause is. Maybe it's just me.
This is interesting, because to me it naturally seems that communicating through speech face-to-face is far superior to text communication. It's the only way to read tonality in a voice as well as body language, which gives a lot of insight into the person's relationship to the material they're communicating. It's faster to shoot quick follow-up questions back and forth (and again, by seeing their response you can see if you're asking the right questions). And the face time can also be used to build rapport and strengthen relationships with the person you'...
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.