WHAT’S THE POINT?
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. It seems to me that the more tools we have to stay up to date with people, the less connected we are becoming. As technology has infiltrated our lives, we have become separated from the realities of face-to-face communication.
The modern technologies of the Facebook or MySpace are mere examples of what I am writing of, but in reality it goes all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, as more people gathered in cities and moved off the farm. As convenience took hold and mass production of goods became the standard, distance was created between the tradesman and the customer. Today, we see greater examples of the distance, but the movement away from each other has been growing for quite a while.
This thought has been rattling around in my brain for about three months now. It began when I was driving up Lincoln Boulevard, and for some odd reason, I had the windows down on my car. Now, I’m a modern L.A. driver, and that means that I usually have the air conditioning on, and some music is playing low in the background so that I can hear my phone when someone calls me, or I make a call.
But this day, with my window down, arm hanging out the way my father used to, I noticed the car next to me — their window down also. I could hear the conversation of the occupants. It was no great dialogue, just a couple of people chatting about the latest goings on in their lives. But it was notable for its uniqueness today, and commonness of yesterday.
I had just seen “American Graffiti” on TV, and that classic view of the ’50s in smalltown American life was fresh in my mind. In the movie, most of the cars are driven with their windows down, and the kids are yelling at each stoplight, and goofing with people on the sidewalks. Clearly, it was a convention in the movie, but it was also a real depiction of what life was like.
I can remember as a kid my father was a salesmen. He drove all the time. He also smoked like a fiend, and the view of his left arm, out the window of the car, cigarette in hand, was like a permanent fixture attached to the car. That was normal. People drove with the windows down in the summer because most cars did not have air conditioning, or if they did, it didn’t work very well.
The technology of air conditioning and its growth into standard equipment on all cars these days is one of the factors that has led to our increased distance from each other. For a car culture like Los Angeles, where people regularly spend two hours a day in their cars, the fact that we can create a cocoon of comfort has insulated us from situations that used to force us to at least recognize each other.
In the ’20s and ’30s, when most people did not own their own cars and had to take public transportation, the social aspect was forced upon people who had to share space with one another, for however brief a period. We had to be polite to each other, because we knew we were going to run into each other again tomorrow.
In the ’40s and ’50s, we became a car culture, but still there was some opportunity for seeing your neighbor at the stoplight and we could have that 40 seconds of social interchange to see how the “wife and kids are” or find out that “Jim’s out of town on business this week, come over for coffee and cake after dinner.”
The brief interludes of communal face-to-face living have been slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, removed from our daily lives. Even in a smalltown like Santa Monica, where one’s odds of seeing friends by happenstance are much larg-er, we still have a huge gap in our social interchange, unless we make it a point to seek out others.
Many people these days are looking to the Internet to create a sense of community. In fact, “community” and “networks” are the big buzzwords of the Internet gurus who are seeking to create the next great web application. Geocities was built on the theory of communities, little groups of web pages, associated by commonalities. Facebook was originally designed for college kids to get to know each other, and is now open to everyone to create their own little interconnected groups. Friendster, LinkedIn, Senior.com and a bazillion others are all attempting to create a sense of connectedness among their members.
Gen Y, The Millenials and the Net Generation are all names that apply to the current crop of youth, generally considered born from 1976 to 2000. These are the people who are driving the constant communication craze. They text message each other incessantly and chat on the phone with those not present — while they are in group activities. Watch any herd of four teenagers walking down the Promenade, and the odds are that one of them is on the phone talking or texting — to someone who isn’t there.
Technology is not a bad thing intrinsically. It generally does a great deal of good, but there are costs. The latest cost seems to be face-to-face interaction. That “coming into contact with each other” and actually knowing someone. Yes, we can keep up to date on the goings-on in others’ lives with e-mail, cell phones, webpages, blogs and text messages, but from my own experience, it is not as satisfying as actually seeing someone in person and being able to interpret their face and body language.
There is some indefinable, extra quality to human communication that is present when two people talk in person, and it is lost when the interaction is reduced to letters on a screen, and we should not forget that.
David Pisarra is a business development lawyer in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 3, 2006. Read the original PDF.