Love me or leave me, but please don’t tweet me

Much as we hate to travel to New York City, last summer we decided to make a trip there for a college reunion. But the real motivation was to see a lot of our family.

We emailed three of our five grandsons who live there, as well as our three adult nieces, to let them know we’d like to get together while we were in town.

Although we heard back from the grands right away, there was no reply from any of our nieces — for weeks. When the time came to book plane tickets, we finally gave the oldest a call.

“Oh, we had no idea,” Eileen said. “None of us look at email anymore. We only text.” She was kind enough not to mention that phone calls were now considered rather passé by her generation as well.

As George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

This bit of unanticipated reeducation led me to wonder if texting would be the answer to getting a response from a couple of local friends who rarely reply to either emails or calls. And of course it was.

Now that I’ve discovered more and more of our friends, relatives or acquaintances limit their communications to specific social media, I’ve decided I’m going to have to compile a database of how best to contact them. There are limits though. I’m on Facebook but I’m much more of a reader than a poster. I don’t Snapchat, Tweet or Instagram, and I don’t intend to begin.

It seems to me that a lot of the new ways to communicate that are supposed to simplify life often do just the opposite. I find it particularly frustrating to try to lodge a complaint or solve a problem with a company when you discover the only “person” you can reach is a robot whose hearing is so bad it always replies, “Sorry, I didn’t get that.”

I guess you could say I’m beginning to feel like a Luddite. I rarely expect to get a real phone call anymore, especially if silence greets my initial hello. A voice may say she’s “Amanda” as she begins her spiel, but now I do battle with such calls by blocking them. If only we could find a way to keep the culprits from initiating more from 60,000 different phone numbers.

At least “Amanda” doesn’t pose any questions that might lead me to answer “Yes.” I no longer dare say that to unknown callers lest they cut and paste my voiced affirmative to a phony financial commitment of some kind.

Absolutely nothing is simple about communicating anymore. Like many people, I do cherish the few snail mails we still receive, other than every-other-day appeals from the fundraisers we’ve just finished supporting.

Writing and sending notes and letters takes time but there are people and situations where nothing else will do. At least you can be pretty confident that these will reach someone who will read them. That’s not always true of the latest ways of touching base.

Although I’ve used Skype to address book clubs, the last time I was scheduled to talk to a group gathered in Illinois, we temporarily lost our Wi-Fi just as I was about to connect. By the time we managed to reestablish contact, I had also lost my cool.

In the final analysis, I do have to say that getting together in person trumps all other ways of keeping in touch, even if it means crawling through the concrete jungle of the Bronx on I-95 as we finally did last summer. Hugs in real time from a dozen of your relatives or friends make that the time-honored winner in the game of “Life as a Contact Sport.”

Joan Brown of Steilacoom is a freelance writer and author of the book “Move - And Other Four-Letter Words.” She is one of six reader columnists who write for this page. Contact her at joantbrown@aol.com