Technology has made the act of communication amazingly easy. A landline telephone was all I had as a child to communicate with someone when they were not present and it worked just fine. 3-way calling was about all I could handle as a pre-teen, what an amazing advance! Email made letter writing quicker and easier and cell phones can connect me to someone no matter where either one of us are. Skype is the equivalent of the big screen I used to see George Jetson talk to Mr. Spacely on! All of these tools have made communication easier and until recently, I didn't think it helped or harmed the quality. Further developments in digital and online communication (Text Messages, Facebook, Twitter, etc) have continued to make the passing of information easier, however, I feel not necessarily better.
I am finding that people are no longer able to have lengthy conversations or even short, yet important ones, in a face to face manner. Nearly every person I pass while walking or driving is hunched over, staring at some device, locked away in a personal bubble with speakers in their ears - I thought Bluetooth was bad, but iPhones come with two earbuds. The use of twitter and text messages has limited the amount we can say, forcing us to boil down our thoughts to fit - not a word limit - but a character limit.
I experience, on a daily basis, adults who will send out an easily (and most likely) ignored email or text in order to find someone to substitute for them at work, rather than make a phone call and talk to a person. I did a favor for a friend and I received a text message with a heartfelt Thank You later that evening. That is a nice gesture however I was with the person that very day! Why were they unable to simply look at me and say those words?
The 2009 movie Surrogates shows an extreme case of the type of isolation that I see developing in some of our digital youth. SPOILER ALERT: The clip I am showing, in essense, gives away the end of the movie so if you have not seen it you may wish to stop reading now. Surrogates is a movie set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate robots. As part of the plot, a virus is being sent out to disable all of the surrogate robots.
I am attaching a clip to the end of the movie. I apologize for the quality of the video. I am using what I assume is an illegal copy of the movie on You Tube (most of which have been taken down), however for some reason the copy that is dubbed in Hindi is still available. There is really no dialogue during the clip I wish you to view. Forward to the 7:28 mark and watch until 9:40.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=migR8oHSnZk
All of the surrogate robots were beautiful, ageless, and provided the ability for people to hide from the real world. Notice all of the pale, unkempt, robe-wrapped people stumbling out of their homes, unsure of when the last time they saw daylight was.
While this may be an extreme situation, I feel that more and more people are isolating themselves from others, communicating in little snippets of language, losing the ability to have a benign discussion (let alone an emotional one) while looking another person in the eye. Our many tech tools may make our ability to communicate easier, however, to preserve the ART of communication, they should not be used to replace real interactions.
I do not mean to be high up on my soap box here because I am often guilty of climbing into my own little bubble and hiding away. This is simply a rant on my recent observations.
