Case in point: text messaging. Quoting the Spolsky ('Not Just Usability', 2004) speaking about "social user interfaces."
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there’s a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called “phone calls.”
It's not just dates. It's "How ru?" & "running 3m late" and such. This has advanced to where text messaging is now a distinct written dialect, unintelligible to someone from 1993. Meanwhile, voice messages and such are more peripheral... even though they now work through the same UIs and we all have earpieces in our ears anyway. Text is powerful.
That said, text is not always the most powerful media. Photos/selfies and such have become a major 1-to-1 communication medium too. I often find that a phone conversation way more efficient than an email chain.
I also think there are categories of writing that shouldn't be. "Number articles" where an article is describing a company's financial's, for example. A lot of newspapers try to describe a table in essay form. The table would be better. That is still text though, in the sense that this article uses the term.
Choosing the most powerful medium or submedium is crucially important.
It has been a factor, certainly. Probably both good and bad. Spolsky was a pioneer in his concepts of "social user interfaces," and that really showed when he did stackoverflow.
Lowering inhibitions is a broad statement. You can get more detailed. Inhibition is multifaceted, lots of flavours. We can be less inhibited about sending a quick "I love you," less inhibited about arguing, being mean, etc.
Over the last 17 years, all this stuff has experienced a massive multiplier effect. Both the positives and the negatives are multiplied and as culture grows around the technology everything gets more complex.
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there’s a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called “phone calls.”
It's not just dates. It's "How ru?" & "running 3m late" and such. This has advanced to where text messaging is now a distinct written dialect, unintelligible to someone from 1993. Meanwhile, voice messages and such are more peripheral... even though they now work through the same UIs and we all have earpieces in our ears anyway. Text is powerful.
That said, text is not always the most powerful media. Photos/selfies and such have become a major 1-to-1 communication medium too. I often find that a phone conversation way more efficient than an email chain.
I also think there are categories of writing that shouldn't be. "Number articles" where an article is describing a company's financial's, for example. A lot of newspapers try to describe a table in essay form. The table would be better. That is still text though, in the sense that this article uses the term.
Choosing the most powerful medium or submedium is crucially important.