In 2020, when we commonly communicate at the speed of 300 megabits per second, which is the time it takes for an uploaded sadfishing YouTube video to be viewable and liked on a usual high-speed internet connection like Chula's, we can broadcast our fear or pain, worry or depression to countless sympathizers and receive near immediate feedback that is gratifyingly recorded for all to see. Rebecca Reid's article "I Invented the Term 'Sadfishing' So Let's Talk about What It Actually Means" shows that a close relative or friend might have a tough competition against this impressively visual and dynamic emotion generator and responder. How can a mother's real life care measure up against that instantaneity when she has to wait until the son or daughter sends a Line message, calls, or worse, comes back to the hometown after the semester exams? Are the young people to blame for the generational and technological gap that prevents their desired communication with their parents? Reid blames sadfisher celebrities like Kendall Jenner for exploiting youth fandom for ratings and modeling unhealthy emotional behavior and insincere media engagement. She also seems to criticize the youth for being gullible or naive in believing that emojis are true emotions and that the internet is a safe space for them to publish their private insecurities. But factors responsible for this phenomenon of shallow and ineffective communication can include a range of structures and players from cyber security system design and social platform design and distribution to digital literacy that involves both parents and children, both teachers and administrators, government policy makers and corporate CEOs.

The situation of children unwilling to communicate with parents and parents being unable to communicate with their children or spouse is presented more abstractly in Tessa Hadley's short story "Bad Dreams." When the girl wakes up after a nightmare epilogue where beloved characters in Swallows and Amazons have unfortunate endings that shakes her sense of security and makes her feel impotent, she secretly topples the furniture in the living room. Here, the failure to communicate—the need for secrecy—is intentional and, to the girl's mind, a source of empowerment. Hadley's scenario presents lack of communication as symbolic. The mother's waking up, seeing the disarray and uprighting the furniture, also secretly, is likewise symbolic. While the girl's silence reflects not only a reclaiming of lost agency but also an awakening maturity and independence ("she does not cry out for help" after her nightmare), the mother's discommunication also represents a revelation and revenge—a reclaiming of agency of sorts—but highly ironic in both cases. Her revelation that her husband has upturned the furniture is mistaken, but her realization that her husband is less than a paragon is accurate. Her quiet revenge to never speak of the manipulated furniture to him, though misguided, is ironically empowering, giving her a sense of superiority and control that she has never felt. What is responsible for these silences, these refusals to communicate, in "Bad Dreams," then, is paradoxical and much more abstract than in Reid's article. For the girl, the forces driving her non-communication is on one hand a sense of growing up and control and on the other a childish sense of play and silly daring. For the mother, the reason for not communicating is a defiance that is ironically both fulfilling (her wifely duties are now purposeful) and empty (based on false understanding of the husband's actions). The silence in Hadley's short story builds to a crescendo by the end where the irony of unsaid misunderstandings that cover significant change with usual sameness is almost impossible to bear. The fake communication exemplified by sadfishing of Reid's article caused by misplaced trust and value creates the appearance of hypercommunicativity that is a shell for very little true connection between people. Looking at what lies behind lack of communication in both these works reveals that overemphasizing the positivity of communication may be itself a communicative fallacy.