Justin G. Roy

I was rummaging through some boxes this past weekend (all of which had about a pound of dust – gross, I know) and came across a shoebox of old notes that I received while in middle and high school.  Not sure why I kept them (this box has not been opened since I packed up my room and shipped off to college), but what I found was pretty interesting.

These hand written notes were in what we call today, text language.

It was funny to see what was so important to us at the time where we HAD to send a note in the middle of class.  The shapes these notes were folded in also amazed me; why and how anybody thought to fold a note into a football, square with a flap, ect is beyond me. 

At the time I did not think much about the notes, just read a few and threw them away.  However, I was talking with one of my colleagues, Jeff Simeone, about my weekend and mentioned these origami-shaped football notes.  As we started to reminisce about “the old times” (somebody please tell me when this happened), we started to talk about some of the shorthand we would use. 

For example: 4 UR (insert picture of an eye here) only = For Your Eyes Only

As part of generation Y, this got Jeff and I to thinking about some claims (some might have been mine) that the use of technology to communicate has spoiled an entire generation, and continues to put them at risk for losing all emotional intelligence, or soft skills.

Granted, I have claimed many times how instant messaging, email, text messages, and whatever other form of online communication you can think of, will destroy an entire generation’s ability to communicate with somebody face to face.  I have heard many examples where two people will be texting with one another and having an entire conversation; average time is about 30 minutes for what I would consider a 5 minute conversation.  Additionally, I have been the victim of leaving a voice message for somebody on their cellular telephone, just to have them text message me about 60 seconds later saying “what’s up”. 

Now move into the business world, and similar situations are happening.  Take the message example, countless number of times has my voice message been returned with an email.  Not an email at 10pm apologizing for not getting back to me, but an email about 15 minutes later responding to my message. 

How absurd.

So where am I going with all this?  I think I am publicly withdrawing some (not all) comments and claims made against technology and my generation.  First, and foremost, I will say that neither instant messaging nor text messaging was the root of the problem.  We were writing in this “Gen Y Code” long before I was dialing up to chat with some friends. 

Anybody else remember the rotary telephone?