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're talking to.
To put it another way, communicating through speech is much higher bandwidth.
Granted, I'm not as eloquent when I'm speaking as when I can take the time to compose something, and if you need to have a record of the conversation then text is clearly superior. But I'm surprised you take anything else as an affront.
To put it another way, communicating through speech is much higher bandwidth.
Agreed that speech has higher bandwidth; but (to me at least) it seems to also have a much lower signal to noise ratio.
But I'm surprised you take anything else as an affront.
I don't, in general. Circumstances matter and I don't find people talking to me offensive in itself, even though it's not my preferred form.
I do take it as an affront when I go to considerable effort to be clear about something important, to answer possible questions, to describe alternative options, ...
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.