While sociologists might debate the possible negative effects of massed text-based communication on the development of broader social and inter-personal skills, there does seem to be a significant risk at times of defaulting to texting rather than phoning when engaging in business.
There has been a lot of commentary recently in the press relating to the potential dangers of the social media and our mobile IT society.
The argument runs broadly along the lines that entire generations are becoming adults without having developed the prerequisite verbal and inter-personal social communication skills needed in business. This is slightly tenuously attributed to the effects of mass texting rather than speaking to people either face-to-face or on the phone.
This is a big subject and one that we at Server Sentry don’t particularly have a position on in terms of social interactions but we will make one observation about the use of texting in a business environment.
Few people would dispute that texting is increasingly replacing both verbal communications and email. There are many reasons why that’s the case but it does bring with it a potential risk.
Texting, even in unabbreviated form, has a tendency to be ambiguous and subject to misunderstanding as a result. In some situations that could be potentially disastrous.
Imagine a text “please delete information just sent”. Does that mean information that the text sender has previously sent to the recipient or vice-versa?
It simply isn’t clear and could lead to hugely embarrassing misunderstandings in a way that a quick 30-second telephone call wouldn’t.
From a technical computer support viewpoint, there is no real difference to the challenges posed by the various communication approaches but from a business computing management perspective, it might sometimes be faster and less risky to make a quick phone call than to exchange multiple potentially ambiguous texts.
It’s a difficult balance to get the right but it is one worth thinking about!