Are our friends and family sometimes — and more frequently — a pain in the neck with their many attempts to communicate with us?
Consider this observation from Elizabeth Bernstein, writing in the Wall Street Journal: “Dear Friends and Family: I love you and miss you and want to hear from you. But you’ve got to stop spamming me. Please quit sending me long, unsolicited, multi-part texts and Skype video requests during work hours. Facebook messages I won’t see for weeks. And those phone calls where you hang up without leaving a message. And please, I beg you, stop calling my cell, home, and office phones; sending me texts, and E-mailing all of my accounts — all within the space of two minutes.In all the noise, I can’t hear you.It’s a growing, yet unspoken problem in many relationships these days: We’ve become communicatively incompatible. There are too many ways to converse, each of us has a favored method (mine is E-mail), and no one wants to compromise.”
Click the image for the full WSJ story.
Illustration by Scotty Reifsnyder for the Wall Street Journal