Several years ago my 12-year-old niece had a phone conversation with her grandmother. After she hung up, she turned to her mother and said, “That was weird. I said something to Grandma, and she listened. Then she said something, and I listened. And we just went back and forth like that.”

Her mother responded with, “Dear, what you had was a conversation!”

“It was really different,” she replied.

To this young girl, the back and forth of conversational exchange and the tuned-in listening and responding was perceived as a foreign experience. This anecdote gives us reason to pause and question whether the world around us is evolving or devolving in communication. We must also question just how much we are being shaped and influenced by our communication forms. Marshall McLuhan, the leading prophet of the electronic age, stated that “the medium is the message.” My question is, “How deeply has the medium molded the messenger?” Are we becoming anatomical extensions of the technologies we employ to keep in touch? Are we beginning to behave just like these technologies?

Furthermore, are these modes of communication helping us to evolve into more effective communicators or hastening our devolvement into nothing more than “messengers” who send and “contacts” who receive?

Culturally and individually, we would do well to examine whether we are becoming more impatient in our communication with others. Are we becoming more self-centered, more clipped, bottom-line oriented, demanding and/or more dismissive in our communication? What role do the devices and technologies we use play in shaping our communication behaviors and attitudes?

Ask yourself if the modern mediums for communicating are helping you become a more patient communicator, a more understanding listener, or a more thoughtful responder. One clear impact of technologies upon our behavior is that they are eroding our ability as conversationalists and often neutralizing our desire to engage in conversation.

It’s funny to note that almost 200 years ago, Henry David Thoreau was lamenting the same thing—tech’s influence on communication—after telegraph wires spread across the countryside. Because people had to pay for each word, he felt they would necessarily reduce their communication to the bottom line. They could literally measure their words with money. He felt the art of conversation and human connectivity were in peril and that people would soon fall into a pattern of directing messages at one another instead of exchanging ideas that struck deeper chords.

In our day, our problem is more about the economies of time than of money. We have become impatient communicators with a stopwatch instead of a clock. We feel a perpetual and driving need to jump to conclusions about our problems without navigating the causes and effects. The technologies available to us are feeding our general inclination toward impatience, making real conversations harder and creating distance between speakers.

Arguably, the invention that blazed the trail for the current trend in communication arrived in 1971. PhoneMate introduced one of the first commercially viable answering machines, the Model 400. The unit weighed 10 pounds, could screen calls, and held up to 20 messages on a reel-to-reel tape. There was also an earphone enabling private message retrieval.

Its original intention was to ensure people would never miss a call. The unintended consequence was that people had their first opportunity to screen calls and avoid talk. They could now respond on their own timetable. People were literally off the hook for having to converse with a person on a matter in which they would rather not. If the other party also had an answering machine—and the caller had a good idea the person would be at work—they could simply choose to leave a message.

The temptation to avoid face-to-face discussion is powerful. Fast-forward to now, and we have texting, which has accelerated the messaging phenomenon into the dominant state of social intercourse. It’s where much of the traffic is flowing.

Modern communication sometimes feels like conversation, but the human exchange is missing, and connectivity is compromised when we message instead of talk face-to-face in order to save time.

Our society has begun to feel the effects of the downward spiral. These days, we feel more comfortable if we are in control of whom we talk to and when. We feel insecure meeting someone in person. Think of people in adjacent workstations—no more than 10 feet apart—emailing each other. We are cocooning ourselves within messaging bubbles where we are in contact with people but not necessarily in touch with them.

This is what Thoreau worried about. We can’t help but wonder what kind of conversationalists will emerge from the texting generation. If the medium is indeed the message, then the message is clearly, “Be brief, get to the point, respond immediately—and I’ll respond when it’s convenient for me.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-technology. In fact, I love the efficiencies that it offers. I use messaging services every day and appreciate having the expeditious and reductive option available when needed. But I also recognize how easy it is to lose touch with the borders between messaging and conversing.

I developed an exercise for my workshop audiences that illustrates this point: People are paired up and given a communication kit that includes a mask and a blindfold. I explain that they are going to have a conversation about an important life issue in three segments of 90 seconds each. In the first segment, they are required to put on the mask and communicate with a pen and pad they pass back and forth. In the second segment, they are instructed to take off the mask and put on the blindfold and then resume their conversation verbally. In the final segment, without the props, they are encouraged to converse.

In the final segment, you feel the air cleared of obvious frustration. People are talking freely and animatedly. At that point I ask, “What does this remind you of?” and participants talk about texting and phone calls—and the shortcomings of each. Participants also notice how much more people tell than they converse.

They notice that in texting we remove one additional sensory perception by removing our ears from the conversation. We can no longer hear the hesitance, the relief, or any of the other audible clues to emotion. We are trusting keyboard characters and symbols to interpret what our eyes and ears are designed to do—and that is to interpret emotion (although the use of emojis attempts to accomplish that). This compromise is that our brains are being “wired” away from the instincts to converse in a way where there’s a real exchange.

Though the move toward messaging may really be about people wanting to save time—again, it seems more about avoidance. And if so, what are they giving up? In a real conversation you can hear somebody’s inflection and cadence and sense their mood. With messaging it is far too easy to misread—we have “send” buttons but not “understand” or “interpret” buttons. A lack of practice in conversation makes for imperfection in communication.

I’m beginning to pay closer attention to what form of communication I use and the context that I use it in. I’m cautious now about being rewired away from achieving connectivity by the forms I’m using to connect. After all, sometimes only a face-to-face conversation will do.

Mitch Anthony is the creator of Life-Centered Planning, the author of 12 books for advisors, and the co-founder of ROLadvisor.com and LifeCenteredPlanners.com.