Text Message History - March 2017 - May 2018
Text messaging has been a great blessing for keeping a dialogue between my loved ones across the country and around the world, but I do not see it as a solution. When my best friend joined the military, went away for training, and our primary mode of communication became text messaging, I felt as though we were losing a lot from our relationship. One could send very long, detailed texts to a friend, but there is a loss of intimacy that happens. Almost solely talking through words on a screen with my best friend would, at times, be problematic for us: miscommunications would occur due to the inability to see the other's facial expressions and hear their tone of voice, and therefore, we would hold important things back from each other.
This realization inspired me to evaluate not only my other distant relationships with my friends and family, but also the ones with people whom I see daily. I went back through all my text messages with six friends and family members from when that person and I first started texting each other, some dating as far back as 2013, and took a screen shot of all our exchanges from then until now. That experience was incredibly emotional, but helpful to strengthen the bonds to my loved ones.
My fascination with data visualization prompted me to display the screenshots chronologically in a grid creating a piece of documentation of a historical, technological correspondence, and a way to compare the relationships with my various loved ones. The illegible, yet recognizable screen shots in large quantities push the idea how a majority of our exchanges with one another might be through text messages, but an outsider would only be able to get a glimpse of the full relationship.