Digital Love

TOO CONNECTED?

In today's time, funny tweets and Bitmojis are how we communicate with the people we consider our closest friends. How do we measure the closeness of our relationship? By number of text messages sent? Online relationships are extremely important and, also, basically unavoidable at this point. The real issue is figuring out how to balance the physical portion and digital portion of our relationships. This balance is necessary because if a relationship is overly physical in today's age, your ability to communicate when you are separated is hindered. Yet, if a relationship is overly digital, things might become awkward when having to live out the physical portion of the relationship. Anyways, although by no means am I an expert on this subject, I do have a few tips that I've picked up from being a millennial.

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 DISTINGUISH 

One of the key mistakes I think that people make when attempting to balance the digital and physical portions of their relationships is the intertwining of the two. Just like this cute sign from a coffee shop, when you are in places with someone the digital portion of your relationship is currently paused. There is no need to talk to each other through text, tweet, or strange acronym. (See how many of these acronyms you know with this quiz...I didn't know quite a bit of them) At least for me, I feel like my life is very busy and when I have time to be physically with someone I take it as precious time. Now, I do have to admit when I am sitting in my room with my roommate, we send each other tweets even though we are four feet away from each other. I would attribute this to us always being physically together, so we try to incorporate the digital aspect of our relationship whenever we can. Plus, internet jokes, or memes, are how those in my generation relate to each other at least some of the time.

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WAS THAT SARCASM?

As someone who enjoys being sarcastic from time to time (okay maybe a little more than that), I have noticed that it is one of the hardest things to convey digitally. According to this article, there is a scientific method to conveying efficient sarcasm over text but I'm not sure I am buying it. For example, my mom is a person who struggles to get sarcasm, so to risk her being upset with me I never even attempt to be sarcastic when texting her. However, my dad lives for sarcasm so communicating with him in this way is much easier. The point is, there is a time and place for sarcasm and it is not as often as one might think. Sarcasm is a great way to ease tension, be silly, and sometimes get a larger point across without being extremely critical or formal. Sarcasm is also a very body language driven thing, so only with the help of emojis, extra punctuation, or literally saying it was sarcastic is it received well and sometimes not even then. The key to sarcasm, in my opinion, is learning which people respond well to it and which ones don't. Learn the ones that don't and joke with them in more straightforward ways in order not to waste time explaining that you weren't really serious. I think this is also a key component to the balance of relationships, learning and listening to how a person communicates best, their linguistic signals for their emotions, and also making time to spend physical time with that person whenever possible.