IT’S THE COMMUNICATION AGE. AT THIS point in world history we are more in contact with our global brothers and sisters than we have ever been. Talking to a long lost friend in Moscow is as inexpensive as calling mom in Malaysia these days, and the avenues of communication are ever present.
From our cell phones, land lines, Internet messaging, Voice Over Internet Protocol, e-mail, text messaging and voice messaging, we are always in contact and “reachable.” I saw an ad this weekend for one of the phone companies. It featured a pretty young girl in a bikini at the beach lying on a towel looking at her phone reading a text message. The headline was something like “Always be in contact,” implying the phone company had great service.
On the one hand I understand their message, and I support it. When I want my phone to work, it better work. We have become socialized to the idea that we deserve to be able to “reach out and touch someone” everywhere. There is only one thing as frustrating as not having a signal, and that is losing a signal mid-sentence.
On the other hand, I like to be able to shut the world out. Each summer I spend approximately 4 weekends living in a ramshackle, baby blue, double wide trailer with a lumpy bed, specifically, because there is no cell phone service. Those days of being incommunicado are bliss filled periods of peace and solitude.
Which is why, the telephone ad so annoyed me. The point of being at the beach and relaxing is so that you can relax. The idea that one has to always be available is intrusive.
We have become a society that is always in contact and yet we communicate less. I have an acquaintance, whom I have known for about 18 years now. We don’t speak often, and frankly, I have a hard time getting him to respond to e-mail or text messages, but he’s added me to two networking sites. I find it quite curious that I have a hard time getting an answer from a text message or an e-mail, yet he feels compelled to add me as yet another friend on his Web page’s list of 200 ‘close’ friends. To me it is a faux sense of connection, and I’m seeing it among more and more of my contemporaries.
I expect this superficial adoption from teenagers, who incorporate technology much more quickly into their lives without understanding that real relationships require face time. Teenagers by their nature are shallow and transient, but with great emotional swings, so that everything is blown out of proportion in importance and substance.
What I see is a future of social ills as a consequence of all of this. We are becoming isolated, as we are more connected. Rather than actually meeting someone face to face, picking up a phone and talking to someone, we are transmitting data back and forth, and losing the human touch, and more importantly the human discernment. When someone texts me “R U OK?” and I reply “yup”, they can’t see the pain on my face, hear the quiver in my voice or see that I haven’t shaved for three days.
The phone, the Internet and computers, are only the tools of communication. They are not the message. The content of the message is more than simply the words, there is the meta-message which is conveyed by the tone, the inflection and the intimate knowledge we have of each other — an intimacy that is only created and understood when we actually see or hear each other.
I love technology, but it is no substitute for actual time spent with the people in my life, and I think that merely having a link on a Web page is not a real connection with that person.
I believe that we must take the time, and make the effort, to be in the same space with our friends. Once we have that true personal connection, then, the flexibility, and omnipresence of constant communication thanks to Ma Bell, can be real.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 4, 2008. Read the original PDF.