Communication In Relationships Before Cell Phones Case Study

Communication in relationships before the widespread adoption of cell phones was different in the sense that there was no constant method of getting to know each other’s whereabouts and thoughts. When interviewing my father, he told me how he would have a difficult time meeting up with friends because there was no constant communication. He would call them over a landline phone and discuss a time and place to meet up with his friends, and everyone was expected to be there promptly. He also explained how if someone was late to a meet up, no one would know why and how to get into contact with them. (Yaser, 2015) When there is “a substantial time lag between the message production and consumption,” the communication is classified as asynchronous.

Face to face communication was much more common and people felt the need to get together and discuss matters in person. Now that cell phones are widely adopted, he has been meeting with others less often and relying on mediated communication as the primary method of communication. Although he sees this as a positive and finds it convenient, he also finds it difficult to interpret the messages that are being sent to him and has a hard time conveying how he feels when texting or using any other kind of instant messaging app on his cell phone (Yaser, 2015). This idea of having a difficult time with conveying and interpreting messages that are being sent and received over mediated communication has to do with the levels of social presence. Social presence is the “measure of media, arranged on a continuum from high to low, that is concerned with the ‘feel’ of the communication allowed by the particular media” (Mandelbaum, 2015). In this case, the use of cell phones has a low social presence since important nonverbal cues such as visual, tactile, that are found in face to face communication are absent. Since my father relied so heavily on these cues before the use of cell phones, he had a difficult time adjusting to the absence of these cues and would have to adjust accordingly. This initially put a strain on the relationships he had because of the misunderstanding that would take place over the use of cell phones and specifically texting, but he managed to overcome that