By: Tyler Feehery

“Why would he say that in a text?” “I really wish she would have said that to my face.” “What did he mean by this?”

In an increasingly texting-centered society, most of us have had thoughts like these.

Numerous studies have found that texting is the most commonly used form of digital communication, especially among young people. Millennials and Generation Z are notorious for wanting to avoid confrontation, and they have an increased amount of asynchronous communication channels at their disposal to help them do so.

Asynchronous communication offers several benefits, but at what cost? Does such a heavy reliance on lean communication channels—phone calls, text messages, emails, etc.—hinder the ability to maintain close relationships?

Research supports that people tend to avoid in-person interactions if they feel as though they are going to be in a face-threatening scenario, and that young people can maintain good relationships, even in lean channels of communication.

Preferring Digital to Face-to-Face

Wanting to learn whether communicators are more likely to choose lean channels in situations where they are posing a higher face-threat, Erin Ruppel of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee conducted a study in 2018. In the study, published in Communication Reports, she looked for this trend in close relationships as well as casual acquaintances.

Students surveyed for this study were tasked with evaluating hypothetical face-threatening scenarios, such as delivering bad news, criticizing someone’s decisions and sending messages that may construe disrespect, both through text and in person. These scenarios are known as positive face threats.

The study also included negative face threats, which impose on others by asking for a favor or taking the time of a busy person, for example. Simply put, positive face threats jeopardize likability, and negative face threats jeopardize autonomy.

While the participants did prefer leaner channels in interactions that threatened their face, relationship type had no influence on their preference—close friends, significant others and family members would still rather commit face-threatening acts via text.

Young people have begun to exploit the perceived benefits of digital communication. Lean, asynchronous channels eliminate the need to navigate nonverbal language and afford a delay between message receipt and response. Digital natives love to take advantage of these traits when posing a possible face-threat.

Ruppel’s study shows that close friends have a high competence of mitigating virtual face-threats, but is there a downside to this? Texting does offer a number of unique benefits, but the question of how it affects the overall relationship quality still remains. Can healthy relationships develop over text?

The Effect of Going Digital?

Additionally, college-aged students have proven that they can establish closeness, even in the leanest of channels.

Lean, asynchronous channels eliminate the need to navigate nonverbal language and afford a delay between message receipt and response, and young people are known to take advantage of these perceived benefits. But, can healthy relationships develop over text?

Liesel Sharabi and David Roaché, communication studies professors at West Virginia University and Aurora University, researched whether more trust, self-disclosure and overall satisfaction are found in in-person relationships than textual relationships. They published their findings in Communication Studies in 2019.

The researchers collected data via an online survey from 418 undergraduate communications students who had been in both an in-person relationship and a text-based one since the time they started college. The students were surveyed on the levels of attraction, closeness, disclosure, satisfaction, trust, the length of the relationships and the motivations behind them.

Overall, the participants’ in-person relationships showed significantly higher levels of each of the categories they were surveyed on. However, their textual relationships did not show low levels by any means.

Because college students’ textual relationships still ranked high on the scale of relational quality, the study proved the students’ ability to maintain their relationships, even ones that took place exclusively in lean communication channels.

Digital textual communication has a relatively poor reputation, but these two studies show that the quality of a relationship may not be diminished as much as we think by going digital.

The fact remains that everyone needs the ability to communicate in person and digitally. In an increasingly media-based world, we need to be fluent in synchronous and asynchronous communication; in-person and textual relationships; and lean channels and rich channels.

Cover image: Freepik on Pinterest