– Dr. Dipon Sharmah
Recently, I stood in front of my first-semester students and spoke not about plants but about their phones. It was a session on digital well-being, which was part of the Mental Health Awareness Week at our college. While lecturing, somewhere in the middle I told them that we as human beings are outsmarted by the very smart little device that we built and carried all along. The greatest proof of this isn’t how much we look at our screens, but how little we now speak to one another.
For more than two lakh years, humans have been speaking with one another. We have been speaking long before the advent of the written word, the printing press, or the smartphone became part of our daily life. Spoken language is not just a communication tool, but it is our biological inheritance. It helps build trust by letting us express our care for our loved ones. But something is quietly changing. As we enter an age of unprecedented digital connectivity, we are speaking fewer words to each other, day by day, year by year.
A study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science confirms this. Since 2005, the researchers found that the average person speaks about 338 fewer words each day than the year before. One might argue: it is only 338 words, so why are we complaining so much? My students might see it through the lens of the exam answers they write: just a little higher than the 200-word limit for a five-mark question, and way lower than the 600-word limit for a ten-mark question. On the surface, the loss does not feel alarming. However, one must not ignore the math and the magic of compounding. When compounded annually, that deficit reaches a staggering 120,000 words.
This decline is not sudden. It was not like we woke up one fine day to find our ability to talk was completely gone. Rather, the erosion has been gradual. For example, at the grocery store, we prefer to pay our bills by quickly tapping on a payment screen, and, thus, our brief exchange with the cashier is gone; while navigating unfamiliar city streets, we now rely on GPS instead of asking a stranger for directions; and even at the family dinner table, we are often glued to separate screens. Yours truly, hailing from a coastal town, can relate to it, as it is much like slow coastal erosion. During my recent visit to Netaji Island (formerly Ross Island), I looked at a fifteen-year-old photograph of my colleagues and me playing cricket on the sandy beach, which has now retreated.
Although the study focused on Western societies, its warnings are relevant to us here as well. The timeframe of the study, from 2005 to 2019, is not a coincidence. It covers the precise years when texting became universal and social media, from Orkut to Facebook to YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, evolved from novelty to necessity. As the smartphone intruded into everyone’s life, the researchers noted a direct correlation.
Through the course of evolution, nature has hardwired our nervous systems to respond to the warmth of the human voice. Text notifications, no matter how beautifully composed, simply cannot replicate that biological connection.
What actually travels between two people in a spoken conversation? My Physics department colleague would say it is mere sound waves. But language, as any of my English department colleagues will attest, is not merely physics. It is the pregnant pause before a reply, or the slight tremble in a friend’s voice when they insist they are fine. It is the spontaneous laughter that fills a room. And it is the pin-drop silence between two people after something important or confidential has been shared.
Can these nuances travel or even survive in a text message? The current generation might use hundreds of emojis – a thumbs-up, a red heart, a laughing-crying face, or folded hands – but do they carry the same depth and weight as a spoken word? Deep down, we all know what is happening and what we are losing. Yet, we keep choosing the shortcut.
In recent years voice notes have become increasingly popular on platforms like WhatsApp. Perhaps we are trying to find a middle ground by injecting speech into our digital spaces. But a voice note is still a monologue. It lacks reciprocity; there is no pause and no spontaneous laughter.
Humans are, of course, an adaptive species. We have always adapted to new tools, and we will adapt to this one as well. But adaptation does not negate loss. T.S. Eliot once warned of a world that ends “not with a bang but a whimper.” The quiet recession of the spoken word is unfolding in much the same way, without any big announcement, like the beach at Netaji Island where the small cricket pitch from my old photograph is now water. Therefore, it is worth standing on the shore for a moment, before the whimper fades away, to ask ourselves what we truly stand to lose.
Short Bio: Dr Dipon Sharmah is Assistant Professor and Head of the PG Department of Botany at Jawaharlal Nehru Rajkeeya Mahavidyalaya, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, where he has taught since 2011)
