【With You Again】

At any given moment,With You Again I have, on average, five unread text messages, a couple unread Instagram messages, dozens of unseen Twitter DMs, and close to 1,000 unread emails along with a smattering of other messages on services like Facebook, Snapchat, and Slack.

It's too much, and it's becoming too hard to keep up with all of it.

All of these inboxes to check and ways to talk to one another, in theory, make communication easier, more natural, and fluid. But in practice? This disjointed way of communicating in the modern world just makes everything more exhausting.

Instead of having one place to check, we have a dozen, and it makes the likelihood that something will fall through the cracks even greater than it was when we relied solely on email and one or two social networks.

We have so many ways to communicate with one another that it makes me feel as if I'm no longer connecting, just reacting.

Most of the time, when I'm getting in touch with someone via DM on Instagram or Twitter, it's in response to something posted publicly.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and in many ways it leads to more open communication with people I'm not usually speaking to, but that's as far as it goes.

While in earlier years I would have sent a long text or email to a good friend to get in touch, these days, I just write a quick reply to an Instagram Story and call it a day.

Our huge number of options spread across multiple platforms leads to shallow communication.

Sure, part of this is definitely about me personally and my inability to stay current with all of the ways we interact in this modern world, but there's still something more to be said about how this fragmented form of communication can be overwhelming.

And it's only getting worse, as each app and platform seeks to keep users for longer periods of time, including by adding in messaging functionality.

All of these apps and platforms compete for our time and attention. As a result, we know more about the day-to-day motions of our friends lives than we ever did before, but is any of that really producing long-lived, deep, and meaningful connections, or is it just creating a world where all of us are really good at small talk through quick DMs?

I'd venture to say it's the latter. Call it the great shallowing and scattering of interpersonal communication.

The unfortunate thing about this is that there's no immediate solution that I can see. There's no returning to a Hotmail versus Gmail world, nor would I want to go back to that, necessarily.

Instead our communication is getting more and more scattered. Maybe an app will come along to vacuum up all our DMs in one place, but will it change anything about the shallow content of our communications?

Probably not, but maybe realizing the problem is half the battle.

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