"Talking" on a TTY

I had a random thought this morning about TTYs, which admittedly isn't where I expected my coffee to take me. For anyone who has no reason to know what those letters mean, TTY stands for Teletypewriter, a technology that allowed people to communicate through typed words over telephone lines and became especially important for Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. In fact, when I told my dad I was writing about TTYs, he shared (and started weeping, the big baby) how excited he was the day he could “talk” on the phone with his deaf parents. Also, my dad said I could share this. He may not have been privy to the parenthetical statement beforehand, 🤭. Depending on the machine and era, those words could appear on a display or come chattering out on paper, often IN ALL CAPS because apparently our earliest versions of texting were very excited to hear from us. More interesting to me was a wonderfully simple convention used to manage the conversation: GA. Go Ahead. When you were ready for the other person to take the conversation, you told them. Imagine that. No, really, just use your I-M-A-G-I-N-A-T-I-O-N (Thank you, Mr. SquarePants).

Now think about two people having a genuinely good conversation. They overlap sentences without consequence, interrupt and get waved back in, abandon thoughts because the other person already understands where they're going, and correct themselves without stopping everything to issue a revised statement. Add facial expressions, cadence, laughter, eye contact, body language, silence or maybe a song, and even the intimacy two people can share during a conversation, and our little bubbles of text aren't even playing the same sport. That's not an indictment of texting. Texting isn't face-to-face conversation and doesn't need to be. Still, if written communication can never capture everything happening between two people, why would we throw away some of the parts it actually could?

There is tremendous value in the opposite approach too. I can write something, reread it, decide it was ridiculous or rude, change it, and only then let another person see it. Letters gave us that luxury long before email made it faster and text messaging put it in our pockets. The interesting wrinkle came when we started using those individually composed messages to carry on conversations, because now we needed some way of knowing what was happening in the space between them.

Oh, the ellipsis.

I'll give those three little periods their due because they have inherent value. If I send something and the other person is still responding, knowing that can keep me from assuming the exchange has ended. The problem is that the same signal creates anticipation without actually telling us much of anything, and I think it takes a sincere level of self-control to have absolutely no reaction when those three little periods form the Voltron of linguistic exchanges.

. Whatever.
.. Okay.
... HELLO?! WHAT ARE YOU TYPING?!

Sometimes the answer is nothing. Someone sends a message, accidentally taps the text box or space bar, puts the phone down and walks away while the recipient waits for a message that doesn't exist. That's a false conversational signal. The technology hasn't determined that I'm communicating; it observed activity and inferred that I probably am. Somewhere along the road from GA to ..., we replaced a person explicitly communicating the state of a conversation with software trying to figure it out from the keyboard.

That road goes back much farther than texting. The telegraph allowed written language to cross distances at speed, and telegraph operators did what human beings tend to do whenever we give ourselves a new way to communicate: they found ways to talk through it. The telephone brought voice, tone, hesitation, interruption, laughter, and even silence along for the ride. For a time, party lines even had multiple households sharing a telephone circuit, which is an entire historical rabbit hole of communication etiquette and neighborhood gossip I am resisting with considerable effort but totes that sounds fun. Teleprinters and TTYs eventually gave written language some of that live quality too, with words arriving as another person created them.

Which obviously brings us to The Three Amigos! There is a scene where a telegrapher, in an admirable effort to save money, makes some editorial adjustments to a message, including the use of “infamous,” which we learn means more than famous. I don't expect this article to become infamous. Writers should probably avoid expecting anything they write to become more than famous in the first place, and saving money seems reasonable enough.

I happened to explain this train of thought to a high-school senior, including the quick history of TTYs going back to the 1960s and what I found so interesting about their conversational quality. She wasn't immediately convinced, and thank goodness I gave her the chance to explain why. Sometimes, she said, she wants to type the text before she sends it.

Of course (with a facepalm). In fact, there is wisdom in that objection beyond defending the communication method her generation grew up using. Sometimes we aren't trying to converse while a thought is forming; we want to consider what we're saying first and let someone receive it only when we're ready. Send the text. Write the email. Mail the letter. Nothing about another method requires abandoning those, and this certainly isn't an argument that anyone should stop communicating in the way they prefer. Quite the opposite. She also recognized that another form could change the rhythm of written communication into something closer to talking. She even reconsidered the “old” technology itself, acknowledging that something invented in the 1960s still had some pretty cool features. I appreciated that too. Apparently, old and obsolete aren't always the same thing. Writing someone a message and conversing with someone through writing are not necessarily the same thing. But you don't have to take my word for it, that's what she said.

This is where an amusing morning thought gets a little more serious, because the ellipsis is one tiny example of something we've become remarkably accustomed to. Technology increasingly observes our behavior, interprets it, and retains information about it, often for useful reasons. Yet it creates the peculiar situation where the technology can know quite a bit about what we're doing while the human being we're communicating with may still know remarkably little about what we're actually saying. Three dots reveal something about my activity without revealing my communication, then invite another person to interpret the difference. Did I change my mind, get distracted, start writing a manifesto, or accidentally hit the space bar?

Human beings were worrying about what other humans thought of them long before Wi-Fi, so I won't pretend technology invented anxiety. I do wonder, though, what happens when so many of our interactions come with little signals telling us someone has read, seen, opened, started, stopped, reacted, or otherwise done something we're invited to interpret. Perhaps there is another direction worth considering: let the people communicating know more about their conversation while asking the technology to know less about them. Nothing inferred. Nothing unnecessarily observed. Nothing unnecessarily retained.

That doesn't require anyone jumping to the last two centuries of communications technology being a mistake. Each advancement built off the wonders before it. Telegraphs gave written language distance and speed. Telephones carried the human voice. TTYs allowed written words to appear during an exchange. Text messaging made communication portable and convenient, while modern messaging added photographs, video, reactions, voice recordings, and global reach. Today's advanced software reduces and even eliminates the need for many of those older features. We don't need acoustic couplers, paper rolls, or even ALL CAPS (thank goodness or sorry, depending on which side of the aisle you fall on this). So perhaps the interesting question isn't simply what technology can add next, but what pieces of those advancements bring written communication closer to how humans actually converse.

That includes making mistakes. If I mispronounce a word while talking, I'll probaly (😚) correct myself and continue without either of us preserving both versions for the historical record. The same could be true when I type “I really apprciate,” notice it, correct it, and keep going. You may have seen the typo. I certainly did.

Fuhgeddaboudit. 🤌

The same goes for an abandoned sentence, a hesitation, or a thought that changed direction halfway through its creation. Something can matter to a conversation without needing to become data about the conversation. Obviously, there are things technology should remember—I would prefer my bank not adopt Fuhgeddaboudit as its records-management policy—but perhaps we've become too comfortable moving from “technology can observe this” to “technology should observe this.” Maybe technology doesn't always need another feature. Sometimes it might need restraint. Maybe it's time technology starts accepting its place.

I keep coming back to that high-school senior because her pause made this worth writing. She listened to the idea, compared it against her own experience, identified something I hadn't given enough weight, and then recognized something potentially valuable on the other side. That's a conversation, and I'm grateful she had it with me. Thank you, young lady. You’re a wiser lass than most.

It also leaves me wondering what those early telegraph operators would think if we handed them everything available today. Distance is practically irrelevant, characters can travel as quickly as we create them, corrections can happen almost instantly, and two people can pause, overlap, reconsider, and continue. Technology can carry vastly more information than those operators could have imagined and, perhaps, doesn't have to keep all of it. They wouldn't recognize the machinery, but I suspect they'd recognize what the people on each end were trying to do.

Talk.

After nearly two centuries spent making telecommunications faster, smaller, smarter, and more capable, perhaps there are still ways for written communication to become a little more conversational by asking technology to do something rather unusual: less. Maybe there's another way for two people separated by distance to simply have a conversation with their fingers.

GA ...