One night I awoke to the sudden blare of the kanye west tune that served as the text alert on my cellphone:

jst hrd “soul food”. i mss u. we shld hook up!

I checked the caller id on the message. It was from a female friend (I’ll withhold her name) that I hadn’t heard from in at least a year and had long since convinced myself to stop wondering why.

She was referring to a song from a music video that I had directed over a decade ago.

The problem was it was 2:00 am on a Tuesday morning and given the deadline that I had in exactly six hours and the fact that I had only just fallen asleep about 45 minutes prior,

I was not too keen on responding.

But I rolled over in bed and thought “what the hell” and proceeded to text back:

whts up? cool, cll me ltr!

As I thought about this exchange later that day it occurred to me once again that I had not actually seen or talked to this “good” friend face to face in what really was over a year.

But through something as impersonal as this thing called texting we had instantly and in a very impromptu way reconnected.

There was no need to call some evening at 8:00 pm when either of us were attempting to settle down in the after a long work day and have that “catch up” conversation or even spend time composing a gmail with all the mundane details of what was happening in our lives these days, with 3 lines and way less than 100 characters we had made contact.

And although months ago I had begun to be a bit concerned about the fact that I had not heard from my estranged friend who in the past had been subject to prescribed rounds of antidepressants and ayanla vanzant book binges, I was oddly enough content with and assured of her well being through that simple communication.

I began to consider the implications that this “simple” mode of contact had on human communication and on relationships as a whole. Because although I had no problem with using text messages, instant messages or the occasional emoticon within an email line to get a point across or make an emotional punctuation, I was struck with how the ease of this dumbed down form of communications has made it possible for us to relate to one another with out the obligation of a true physical or emotional exchange.

Case in point I can recall my guy friend who through the ease of text messaging, some very succinct phrasing and a pix message or two was able to sustain for at least a year relationships with three different females. While he clearly carried on a physical and emotional exchange with one of the women via a family and home life,

he spent whole work days conducting, at times, explicit text conversations with the other two simultaneously.

Now without burdening you with the titillating details of his actual messages suffice it to say any woman could get a significant buzz off the lines he was texting.

But that’s just it, a buzz, only a twinkling of what could be considered an emotional interaction.

And although I do not presume within the context of this blog to define the nature of either of these “text relationships” I do marvel at how easy it is to maintain a contented relationship with another person that is almost soley based on text communication.

When did we come to see pinging a person as an acceptable way of maintaining communication with them? What does this simple, impromptu form of conversation say about how we really relate to one another? And the real question that I think has even more unsettling implications to me as a culture and communications professional is how the hell did terms such as “bff” and “lol” work it’s way into everyday American jargon? Are we turning into a society that is taking it’s cultural cues from AIM and the auto text of our cell phones?

By the way, my female friend never “cll me ltr” but I got an email from her a week later where she carried on about the new guy in her life who she thought she was pretty close to marrying. Interestingly enough he lived 4 hours away in the next state.

Guess how they mostly kept contact?

Rubin Whitmore II, new media scholar