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Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Telephones and email have made communication between people less personal. Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion.
22/M/Japan>>> TOEFL CBT 267 (5.0)
     I disagree with the statement. I even think that telephones and email have made our communication more personal. Though, I don't know how life was without a telephone, because when I was born, there was already at least one telephone machine for each family. But when I was a child, we didn't have email for our communication method. I think that email prevailed in my country in these several years. And someone may think that by using email, we don't have to meet with each other, we just have to email to others instead of meeting. But I don't think so.
     In my country, we use email as a conversation method. For example, we sometimes email to our friends, just to say "Good night". Of course, we don't use our computers to email such a matter. We use our cellular phone to send short sentences. We use our cellular phones to email our daily matters, so if you come to my country you can often see people who are dealing with their cellular phones. If you ride a train or a subway in my country, many people might be using their cellular phones. If you are an American, you will be very surprised to see that. I heard that Americans don't use their cellular phones for such purposes.
     You may still think that email would make our communication less personal. You may think so because if we use email so much, we don't even talk with someone. If we use our telephones as our communication, we can talk with others, but if we use email, we don't even talk with someone. I agree with that. But I guess you are worrying too much. I mean, by using these communication methods such as telephones and email, the chances we meet with someone else are increasing instead of decreasing. By using our cellular phones, we are asked to come by our friends whenever and wherever we might be. We can know at the same time, who have called to us. That is, our cellular phone or our home telephone can store history of who called to the telephone. So without our telephones we might lose our chance to meet or talk with our friends, but with telephone we can be connected to our friends whenever we want.
     As I have said that telephones and email are very useful as communication methods, you might guess that I am a person who likes to communicate in such a way. I want to deny that. I mean, I admit and appreciate telephones and email as communication methods, I still like to meet and talk with my friends face-to-face. I say so because I think the most important and enjoyable thing for our communication is to be in the same place. By sharing the same space and time, we can be more intimate with our friends. So I love face-to-face communications the most. And I think that telephones and email would increase our chances to have real, face-to-face communications.