We swipe. We scroll. We post. We react with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. We use emoji to show how we feel, what we mean, what we're doing — sometimes even to apologize. We skim. We side-glance. We ignore. We look away. And we use this shorthand to let people know the big things too — that they're hired, that they're fired, that we love them, that we don't anymore. We congratulate. We console. We ghost. We reconnect.

Maybe this is simply our way of being in the world now. We used to call it multitasking. Maybe now it's multigesturing.

We use shorthand for some of the biggest parts of being human. Even face to face has become, sometimes, a rendering of our face — an avatar standing in for us. And somehow, with all this communication, we can still miss one another.