“Yup–the pressure to be able to respond immediately in spoken language almost guarantees that whatever I’ll say *won’t* be the most true or reflective version of whatever I want or mean to say.”

I couldn’t have put it so succinctly, but I totally agree. However, for me, that is most intensely, acutely agonizingly the case with strangers (!) in public (!)-aaargh.
The better I know someone (*and* vice versa, definitely), the more I feel able to say-though not necessarily *having* to say a lot in order to convey much (thanks to pre-existing, shared meanings).

Also agree with how Bob put it, about how there are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds of communication-and the profile for those pros & cons will differ with each individual.

Internet metaphor (lest it seem I’m tangenting):

One could say that as newspapers proliferated, people could publish things that would never have been read by distant people otherwise (for good and for ill). Reporting on (such as celebrity gossip) and examples of (such as printed lies) “bad” behavior would depict “goings-on” that one wouldn’t be aware of, save for the existence of & access to the newspaper.
People gossiped about celebrities and made false claims before newspapers, though the papers provided venue where more people could find out about these things, which helped in making such instances of bad behavior seem more ubiquitous due to increased visibility (preserved for posterity, being “on the record”/”in the books”).

Rachel, your post makes more great points than I can address (exceeds my ability to respond comprehensively-but that’s a compliment), and the comments are additionally articulate in noting things I would’ve wanted to mention/agree with.

“To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters…”

On the contrary, I have conversations online, both with people I’ve never met in person and people I’ve known in real life for years, of a depth and range and complexity that I rarely get to in face to face conversation, both because of my erratic work schedule and difficulties with spoken conversation.

“And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection.”

Uh, wrong. Engaging in spoken conversation, for me, is almost mutually exclusive with engaging in self-reflection, unless it’s very relaxed conversation with someone who I’m utterly comfortable with. Otherwise, the social demands of spoken conversation preclude indulging the energy demands of self-reflection. Being able to have an in-depth conversation in text, not in real time, is a huge advantage for my self-reflective abilities.

It’s stunning to me that someone would assess connection as less valuable or important than conversation. I went so long without significant connection to others, and the internet has given me so much connection to other people who have made my life richer and better…it’s just mind-boggling to me.

But I also relate to your “speaking as a second language” comment, even though I’m nominally “neurotypical,” since written language comes much more easily to me (though as a university professor, I’ve learned to do lecture-speech well, but one-on-one is still not as easy for me; that may come from English actually being my second language, and having a tendency to talk very fast and stutter some because I have kept some of the speech-cadence of Italian, though not a clear accent – who knows). And this means that electronic communication has always been my preferred medium … and I thank you for your impassioned defense of it, and your unpacking of the spurious arguments against it.

I’m able to leave the house so rarely, and find it extremely difficult to make friends off-line – I might have a friendly conversation with someone, but if we don’t see one another for months until I next leave the house, we’re not likely to grow close. But I have friends on-line who I “see” and interact with every week.

Some of those friendships are extremely casual indeed, but others run deep. When my marriage broke down, I went to live with one of them. I’m now living with and engaged to another. It is now fairly common for folks to find love on-line, and that’s not done with shallow “dumbed-down” conversations.

This on top of the way that the medium provides accessible community in all the ways you describe. Like you, I can be far more articulate, with much less effort, with time to think and write things down. I think, if anything, this increases self-reflection. Sometimes I write things down and think, “No, I thought I believed this, but now I’ve put it down, I realise my mistake…”

When folks talk about on-line communication in this alarmist way, I can only think they are looking in all the wrong places.