Communication Breakdown

I often times wonder if communication is better or worse now that we have cellphones, texting, email, facebook, instant messaging, etc.
For instance I thought about that last week of my life. Now with work and my personal life I've communicated with roughly 100 people in the last week alone. 1 of them is through a instant messenger application that I have on my blackberry. We've been having an ongoing conversation for about weeks now. I've seen him once, but other than that I haven't heard his voice. I have at any given point 1-10 email chains going with friends. My softball team emails back and forth sometimes up to 40 emails a day. Some of these people I don't even have their phone numbers so emailing is our only communication. I talk on the phone consistently with 1-2 friends each day along with my wife. As far as work goes it is almost done exclusively through email. So to sum it up of these 100 people I had a phone or face to face conversation with a handful or so.
So what does all of this mean. Yes it is convenient. Of course there isn't enough time to talk to each one of these people. But what is lost in all of this. I think the relationships and content of the conversation. I can't possibly say everything I want to say instant messaging. I can't possibly get my tone, attitude, and meaning across in an email or text. So we basically are losing human interaction. We are communicating like animals by taking all emotion out of it. We can't sense disappointment, or sarcasm. We can't sense excitement or happiness. We are replacing these things with emoticons. What if I told you I can't make it to your party and followed it up with a sad face. What the hell does that mean. Does it mean you can't make it and you're sad? Does it mean you don't want to go, but you want to present the idea that you're sad?
I found out my wife was pregnant last week. I met face to face with my family. Phoned a few close friends about it. Texted some others about it, and emailed anyone else that I thought might want to know. So was I ranking the importance of my relationships? This is as important a message I'll ever have my entire life, but I sent a text the same way I would if I was telling someone what time we're playing hockey.
I graduated with a major in communication, so this is an area of extreme knowledge for me. But I think if I went back into college now, we'd have an entirely new set of standards. It isn't just sender, receiver, message anymore. We have an entirely new way of communicating. We have to rank in importance the message, the receivers, the mode of communicating. Are you losing relationships if you're not able to text or email. Are we losing anything if our cell phone gets lousy service. I was talking to a friend this morning when his cell phone cut out. He called back minutes later, but I didn't want to invest in anything conversation wise in case his phone cut out again. We used to communicate one of 3 ways, face to face, phone to phone, or mail to mail. Now we add in phones, computers, and etc.
What about work? I have a staff of 50, and approximately 50 annual tournament contacts that I communicate with frequently. Add in the leads, vendors, and other miscellaneous clients/customers/employees and the numbers reach hundreds. But I try to talk to as few of them as possible. Maybe that's not the best way to get business done, but it's definitely the most efficient. And it's not like I'm the only one. I've tried calling people before and no answer. Only to get a text or email back within minutes. I get it, and don't mind it. We just don't need to interact face to face, or phone to phone.
So thinking about all of this I think we're losing somethings, and gaining somethings. On the plus side, we are able to communicate much more and much faster with anyone and everyone. I talk to friends via text, and email that I wouldn't talk to nearly as much if we had to talk on the phone. So I think that side of it is nice. We are able to stay in contact, when years ago, you lost contact with so many people all the time.
What we're losing though is the human side of it. Look at that one commercial. The guy takes a picture of flowers and sends it to his wife/girlfriend/side action. That is not that same as bringing the girl flowers. But that is what we do. We send text messages saying, I love you. We can all act a hell of a lot tougher behind a cell phone or computer screen. We don't have the time or energy to invest into really caring about what makes our friends, family, and other contacts happy, mad, sad, excited, etc. So it's the emotion that is losing in all of this. We are just evolving once step closer to becoming robots!