Texting, Facebooking and Tweeting have opened many bor­ders in terms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and the “tech­nirev­o­lu­tion” just keeps expanding.

Being a jour­nal­ism stu­dent, it has come to my real­iza­tion that it is at times eas­ier to con­tact a source on Facebook for a story. Phone calls and e-mails are not always answered as quickly as a Facebook message.

Yes, social media and text mes­sag­ing have made our lives much eas­ier. We’re able to con­nect with friends and fam­ily we don’t see on a reg­u­lar basis. If we don’t feel like hav­ing an actual phone con­ver­sa­tion, tex­ting will do just fine.

Honestly, some­times I pre­fer tex­ting to talk­ing on the phone. Talking on the phone has not always been my favorite task, but I’m used to mak­ing phone calls nearly every day. I man­aged to over­come my child­hood pho­bia of phone conversations.

Although I am grate­ful to be a part of the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion gen­er­a­tion, known as the “Millennial” gen­er­a­tion or “iGen­er­a­tion,” I often won­der if the art of an actual face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion will one day be lost forever.

Larry Rosen, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy at California State University, Dominguez Hills, wrote a col­umn on CNN​.com titled “Generation ‘Text’: FB me.” In his col­umn, Rosen high­lighted the dif­fer­ences in how today’s teens and young adults rely heav­ily on social media rather than hav­ing a face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion, which is what pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions rec­og­nized as their main source of communication.

Rosen indi­cated that in the first quar­ter of 2009, the aver­age U.S. teen made a total of 191 phone calls, but sent and received 2,899 text mes­sages per month, cour­tesy of Nielson Mobile.

Is this data a sign of the times? I’d say so. A phone con­ver­sa­tion is just not the main way we com­mu­ni­cate any­more. Aside from phone con­ver­sa­tions, what is going to hap­pen to actual in-person conversations?

Although Rosen refers to the iGen­er­a­tion as the “smartest” gen­er­a­tion yet since they (or, we) are a highly social gen­er­a­tion who value friend­ship and fam­ily, but in terms of face-to-face com­mu­ni­ca­tion, is tech­nol­ogy mak­ing us less effi­cient com­mu­ni­ca­tors in person?

It could just be me, but I find a face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion much more engag­ing and valu­able than an email or Facebook con­ver­sa­tion. Not to men­tion it’s eas­ier to deci­pher one’s tone of voice and body language.

There is just some­thing per­sonal about com­mu­ni­cat­ing in per­son. When I have a face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion, I feel as if I can estab­lish a con­nec­tion. Over e-mail or Facebook, I don’t feel that a real con­nec­tion can be made.

Even a con­ver­sa­tion over the phone gives some insight to someone’s per­son­al­ity by his or her tone of voice, but it’s def­i­nitely not the same. I won­der if we’ll for­get how to take hints and read body lan­guage, cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion bar­ri­ers, which are def­i­nitely not good.

Overall, there are pos­i­tives to the increase in com­mu­ni­ca­tion via tech­nol­ogy and social media, but there are neg­a­tives as well. Have some of us become so used to com­mu­ni­cat­ing via the Internet or text that we no longer know how to hold a real human-to-human conversation?

I embrace the changes our soci­ety and cul­ture are endur­ing, but I never want to lose the abil­ity to have a good, old-fashioned face-to-face conversation.