Telephone

You remember that old game called “Telephone” where a group of people sit in a circle and you whisper something to the person next to you, and they whisper it to the next person, until it comes all the way back around to you and it is *completely different*? Aside from being a good primer for screenplay development notes, this has evolved for the text era.

I spent some time crafting an e-mail to a producer on a project... and a couple days later he sent me a quick text from his phone in response. The problem is, when you send a text you only have so many characters so you use as few words as possible, plus you use those irritating text abbreviations like “ur”, and then your fingers often hit the wrong little keys and autocorrect takes over and substitutes some other word that often makes no sense... or, worse yet, makes complete sense.

So I try to decypher the producer’s text... but I was on the road that day and responded to what I thought he said on *my* phone, adding my autocorrect insanity to my response to what I thought he said, and it went back and forth several more times...

Somewhere along the line I realized that *his* confusion was due to his initial text to me being autocorrected to mean something entirely different that he meant to say. So we have had this entire bizarre debate/argument for no reason at all. Now I have to find some way to make amends and politely get us back on track (and not blow this deal) in another carefully crafted e-mail that he will read from his phone and respond in 140 characters that have been autocorrected into insanity.

For all of these new forms of communication we have available to us now - everywhere we go - yes, even texting on the toilet - we somehow have *less* communication now than ever before. Or maybe more miscommunication.

- Bill