Text Personality

Texting can be dangerous. Loss of tone, keyboard courage, and “receipts” as us milenials refer to proof. Through texting there have been plenty mishaps on my end. The countless amount of times I have screen-shotted a conversation between myself a someone fighting, trying to send it to another person and I by accident send it directly back to that person… awkward. That isn’t a factor with phone calls. Neither is keyboard courage. On text I will find myself typing up condescending texts at times, whereas in person I wouldn’t be as daring. Texting skips over our hololistic selves for sure. It creates a new person.

A funny example of how texting can take on persona, is through my friend Emma. She is a very quiet, artsy sweet girl. Well my friend has a setting on her phone that only allows her texts to be undercase so she is never “digitally yelling”. So, when she is excited its “on brand” for her because she is always quite minimized and never animated. I could say “I GOT MY DREAM JOB!!!” her response would be “omg im so happy for you, you deserve it”, where as my response would look like “NO WAY” (another text bubble) “WHICH COMPANY”. I find it funny how style can showcase real life personality and diction.

Phone calls are definitely less taxing on our brains... not trying to decode what the hell the other person could've meant. But we will continue texting, and continue programming our behavior within blue text boxes.