Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University who studies how people converse in everyday life, tells of a student who “told me that it takes her days to call her parents back and the parents thought she was intentionally putting them off. But the parents didn’t get it. It’s the medium. With e-mails, you’re at the computer, writing a paper. With phone calls, it’s a dedicated block of time.”19 In a world with so much distraction, a world of near-constant communication, it is difficult to dedicate time to one person at a time and one task at a time. Mediated communication
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