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Truly authentic communication, like writing, is learned. We're now in a new tech era in which learning authentic communication, like cursive script, is being completely devalued. But its successor, social media posting, is no substitute. It doesn't exercise the "being human" muscle - not even close. It's Mc-Communication whose screen conveys no verbal cues, nor any tonal clues, both of which are apparent in (indeed which make up the gist of) face-to-face communication. At least telephone communication and two-way video communication have them.
Face-to-face communication, telephone communication, and two-way video communication are immediate, unedited, in-the-moment, unscripted, spontaneous, raw. Unlike postings, they can't be pre-vetted. There's no censuring nor censoring. The immediacy of real communication (the intimacy of it) is something that's learned. Confronted with the inability to be immediate and intimate in communication (simply given the lack of practice which is usurped by social media) there's now evidence of a growing anxiety about communicating directly. It's costing us our humanity. That's a terrible price to pay.
What's worse is it can also cost us our access to transformation. Transformation is constituted in speaking. Without speaking there's no transformation (and no, it's not constituted in thumb-typing). The cost of the expediency of social media is too high. And that doesn't start to address social media as a platform for fabricated truth. One well-known social media giant treats both the truth and private data as malleable. There, untruth is traded for billions (in face-to-face communication, untruth can at least be confronted). Who can be surprised by the current epidemic of telephone anxiety? We've ceded our ability to communicate directly, to the social media apps.