Drabble:Monotonous Conversations

Automatic replies have become an ordinary thing now. I was recently subject to one of these experiences, when I forgot to turn off network sharing for a position update on Linkedin. It got sent out to my 500+ connections, which I immediately regretted but sidelined as spilt milk. What I did not expect was the number of replies and comments I received. But this isn't the point. The point is that over 90 percent of those replies said the exact same thing. The first prompt that LinkedIn's auto-reply feature gave users. For people who haven't observed, most applications have started doing this of late. For instance, Gmail reads through your email, and if it poses a simple question, you get a set of standard responses that you can choose from. LinkedIn, similarly, gives you a few choices that you can instantly use to reply/congratulate/message people. While this is definitely an advancement on the technical front, the writer in me hated it. Maybe I'm being naive. But isn't the whole idea of communicating based on a personal touch? When you write something, it becomes an embodiment of you. An articulation of your thoughts, an expression of your emotions. Even if the intended message is a perfunctory one, it still can be unique. It could make the recipient happy to hear from you. But here I was, reading dozens of messages that sounded exactly the same. As if they were from bots. I didn't even feel like replying. I chose to be part of the same vicious circle I despised, and used the same automatic prompts to reply to all these messages while putting a face and mumbling "It would have been better had they not replied at all".
I wonder now, what if this extends into our lives further? What if we choose to become passive actors, reading through the dialogues that someone else feeds us? Can there ever be a meaningful conversation?