A sort-of-rant about the need to be connected 24/7.

This post originally appeared on Medium.

Ever since smartphones came into the picture, and especially when Blackberry hit the scene, we’ve created a situation of being in sync with each other in real time. Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, SMS/text, WhatsApp, chat clients, you name it. All are ways to get a message across to the person you are trying to reach. Being able to receive a message in an instant is great, or is it?

Back when there were no smart phones you would just send a to-the-point message.

Let’s say you would want to meet and watch a movie together. You rang the person up or sent them a quick message detailing the meet-up.

Fast forward to today.

Person 1: Hey. Let’s meet.
Person 2: Sure. Where?
Person 1: Don’t know yet! Any ideas?
Person 2: Let’s see. We can watch a movie, have a drink or just hang.
Etc. etc.

Let’s call this nano-chatting.

This goes on and on, perpetually. Even at the event or meeting itself sometimes. For example: when you go see a movie nowadays you’re constantly reminded of this fact because everyone needs to stay connected for some reason. Phone screens are lit up in the dark and it is just plain annoying. Every other place I wouldn’t mind that much but it’s distracting and simply rude. I could write on and on about that but that’s for another day. But this is not the only downside to this way of communicating.

It is just so easy to send one word or half a sentence, not think of errors or anything and just add to it. To me that is the culprit. The ease by which we can ‘talk’ to each other these days is amazing. I say ‘talk’ because it is actually just digital communication and sometimes even only one way message.

There’s a lot of noise introduced this way.

People side step to other topics, photo’s are thrown into the mix, etc. It’s very easy to have a group chat in, for example WhatsApp, and discuss what to do, who to see, what to buy, etc. It’s a pretty effective, but not so efficient, way of communicating.

You can chalk me up as being guilty of nano-chatting too. For all the reasons mentioned earlier. But is it actually that bad? Is the old way of contacting each other better? No, I don’t think so. Technology enables a lot of new ways to communicate. Since I’m a technology evangelist (I like to call myself that sometimes — if there’s anything that can be done faster by technology I’d rather do it that way) I of course lean towards this way of doing things.

In the end, the quality of the connection to the other person degraded. The quantity upgraded. Ultimately you have to decide for yourself, which do you like better: quality or quantity?

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Written by Dereck Breuning, our Chief Executive Officer.

Photocredit header: Lex van Lieshout/ANP.

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