We Need Ordinary Conversation

Nowadays, our communication relies on E-mails heavily. It is really rare to see adults without an E-mail account in the U.S. Even college our college provides us E-mail accounts for each student. Why the demand of E-mail as a communication device grew so much? We can analyze the advantages of E-mails over ordinary conversation. We can communicate with an individual in almost any part of the world who has internet connection and an account by simply typing and send an E-mail. It does not charge delivery fee, and it is very speedy, it takes only seconds to send an E-mail to other side of the globe. The E-mail does not require sender and receiver to be connected at same time. E-mail allows communication without actually facing senders and receivers. They are so many more advantages of using E-mails.

However, those advantages can serve as weak point as well. The major difference between communication via E-mail and ordinary conversation is that one does not require face-to-face interaction, while other requires it. I personally think that relying on E-mail as communication tool too much can lead disorder in human interaction behavior since it does not require face-to-face interaction.
When I communicate with people via E-mail, it is very easy to be get confused; for instance, when I read an e-mail which seems criticizing me which was actually meant as a joke. Or when I was intending to point out the error kindly may be received as insult to the other, because of absence of non-verbal cues in the E-mail communication. Telling joke would be perceived by looking one’s smile, or kindly telling one’s mistake can be understood by mild expression in the face. Or anger could be caught by the tone of the voice. Expressing right emotion in writing requires very critical writing skill, and most of would have hard time doing so; this imprecise emotion in E-mail can lead to misunderstanding among senders and receivers.

This neutral effect of emotion, because of absence in non-verbal cues, is nurturing people who cannot communicate in ordinal conversation. Today, in Japan many young people stay in their home and do not even leave from their room; they are called “HIKIKOMORI.” Those people decided to disconnect themselves from real world because of their traumatic experiences. Some of them became Hikikomori due to school buries, while others may be loss of self confidence by losing job. This trend among Japanese young people is getting bigger and bigger each day, which was not seen before in my parents’ generation. Because Hikikomori people can communicate with people via E-mails and internet, they can avoid ordinal face-to-face conversation which they usually afraid of. Thus they are many people who never leaves from their home for years; they do not even communicate with family member. Because of internet and E-mail development, they still enjoy communication with others, but absence of face-to-face interaction for long time makes them difficulties to express their own expression toward others. They slowly become unbalanced emotional people; their awkwardness of expressing their emotion toward real people combined with their fear against facing real human makes them almost unable to return to the real world outside of their room. Because of their long period of staying in small place makes them frustrated and unbalanced in hormones due to stress and lack of exercise, explosion of their emotion can lead to hurting their own family members. Unfortunately, each year, there are many serious incidents caused by hikikomori people. E-mail is very convenient, but we also have to re-evaluate the goodness of face-to-face conversation of interacting emotions. We, humans are social creatures. Without any face-to-face interaction, we will never understand the concept of caring each other, because we never see real smile through E-mail. We are not built to interact with machines.