Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

A friend and fellow writer I hadn’t heard from for a while sent me an email the other day. She wanted some advice, and I readily offered it. Then she wrote me a nice response–the sort of casually witty, stupidly impressive little thing that no one I know could have written but her.

And at the bottom of her thoughtful email, Google offered me three quick responses in the iOS Gmail app:

Thanks!

You’re welcome!

Sounds good to me!

With a tap, I could auto-fill my response to her. Just like on Google’s Allo Messenger or Apple’s iMessage, I could let the software respond to an email or text not with a unique response, but a quick tap to say something like “haha,” “lol,” or “talk later.”

Sometimes, it’s tempting! Sometimes–especially dealing with work emails in the off hours–I have hit those quick response buttons. But I also know that it’s very bad for me, and it’s bad for us, as a collective, creative species. Today, we face one of the promises of Silicon Valley: to quantify us. To average our individuality out. To train a model on all of those collective averages, creating the ultimate average response. To provide the convenience of never speaking uniquely again....