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, and the recipient says, in essence: "tl;dr." This forces me to pay the mental cost of articulation twice, for a worse result, and interrupts whatever else I was doing at the time. The effect is especially bad in my profession because many computer tools do not lend themselves to precise verbal description, and a misheard command can be the difference between getting the expected outcome and ending up with a completely hosed system. This sort of thing is why I say IT folks should know better. I think doctors write down prescription instructions for about the same reason. Small mistakes matter. Heading them off is often the explicit reason I'm communicating in writing in the first place.
Looks to be a subtype of the general observation that whoever can establish her authority in an argument wins.
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.