The old post office in Hearne, Texas, where my grandmother was the Postmaster back in the days when people wrote real letters to communicate. The good old-days, nostalgia, talking about hours spent washing clothes, doing the dishes at the sink, hanging up the wash to dry on the clothes line - those were the days when we had time.
Now we have all these convienience appliances and technology: washing machines and dryers, dishwashers, microwave ovens, kitchen machines, coffee makers, etc. But we have much less time than our grandparents had, even though machines do all the work they used to spend all day doing.
Worse than that, we don't communicate very well. But wait, we have flat-rate calling plans for our mobile phones, land lines, and we have DSL internet, chatrooms, discussion forums in the internet, email (yawn), youtube, skype, text messaging, and probably some more I am leaving out. We are reachable 24 hours a day at every moment. I can experience something breathe-taking here in Germany, grab it on my digital cam, and within one hour friends and family in Texas can experience it with me and comment back. That is possible, at least.
But alas, that never happens.
Technology and convienience have duped us into thinking we have to stay "busy" all the time. Mobile phones are constantly flashing, ringing, buzzing, with someone texting or calling, so what does everyone do? They never answer the phone - let the voice mail pick it up, and "sometime" they will return the call. The time advantage technology gives you is thus down the drain.
And, in my opinion, the classic human weakness eliminates the advantages technology gives us. We become accustomed to the instant effortless communication and assume it, so it is no longer important. Who cares if I sit on an email or a voice mail for two weeks? Everyone is texting and emailing all day anyway, so it means nothing. Or "someday" I will find them on chat and we can catch up "then"....
It seems a predisposition of the more individualistic western mentalities - the USA at the forefront of these - to be preoccupied, "excited", about that which is in front of my nose at this moment. All else pales into oblivion while I am raptured with the object jumping up and down in from of my nose right now. The problem is, technology gives up so many things jumping up and down in front of our nose right now. We have no brain or emotional space for things stored in our memory bank.
There was a time when writing or getting a letter was something special. You got out your fountain pen, cleaned it, filled it with fresh ink, selected a piece of stationery, and began composing your thoughts to someone as you also produced a work of art - penmanship. And when you opened your mailbox and found such a letter, you sat down to open and read it. We still have a letter my great-grandmother wrote over 100 years ago, and her tears are on that letter - what a priceless treasure. When you read that letter, you entered another world as the world jumping up and down in front of your nose paled into oblivion.
Who recongizes anything personal in a times new roman font on a computer screen? We dash off emails with etrocious spelling and grammar, and if we are responding to a previous email, we often don't even answer half of the concerns our writer mentioned in the previous communication. Text messages have become like short hand - something that needs unraveling and fleshing out. And so we sit in restaurants with real live breathing people and ignore them while we stare at our mobile phones and punch letters into the screen for a text message - what a bass ackwards world!
I wonder if we have lost touch with the uniqueness of life and our relationships. Technology makes communication into a ware to be traded and sold on the market, to be quantified and packaged for the masses. We may have email, chatrooms, mobile phones, etc. available 24 hours a day, but the right opportunity for sending or responding to a message is not available 24 hours a day - there are only certain windows for such times. And those who purposefully ignore the distractions jumping up and down in front of their noses so that they can use those windows of communication, those people will help us save humanity from technology. Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?
3 Kommentare:
I believe that our so called communication offers only ways in which to keep people at bay. It goes to the heart of my post of what is friendship. I cannot communicate with a machine, email or mobile ... it is the person at the end of those tools that I am concerned with. Mistreatment can be justified from a safe distance and therefore no guilt /blame attached to you.
I NEVER take my mobile phone to dinner/coffee out, the cinema or meetings.
Promt response is plain good manners as far as I am concerned ... but this modern day society poleaxes me with some of it's rude behaviour. I loved penpals and letters when I was young and I always took the time to respond line by line. Modern technology does have it's advantages ... but it has lessened the value of human interaction.
I still write letters sometime, and I occasionally get one. When I lived in Australia, my mum and me would write letters to each other, and when I got one, I would make myself a coffee, sit down and read it, really enjoying it. But I am grateful also for faster communication like e-mail and mobile phone. I know what you mean about communication becoming a mass-ware that nobody really values anymore. But I do think just because communication has become so quick, we cannot expect people to always answer straight away. I try to answer within a reasonable time frame, but I hate it when people expect me to get back to them instantly. I think we need to keep the inner connection to people alive, and use whatever means we have to do that.
Aggie: Yes, I agree. It is easy to use voice mail, email, etc. to keep people at bay - to use these tools as "butlers" to seemingly coincidentally tell people that "so-and-so" is not available at the moment. Distance would seem to dilute the accountability factor and honesty mandate. It can't, of course. And if you don't return the call or email in a reasonable time period, you tell them they are not important to you. Oh, of course, people always say "I was soooo busy", but aren't we all busy? We always find time for the important things, and that is exactly the point.
Bettina: I think Europeans still have more feel for the uniqueness of ritual and tradition - compared to Americans, at least. When someone takes their time, which they could have used for any number of other good and wholesome activities, to communicate facts, thought, or feelings to me, I show them respect and I honour them by responding appropriately to the things they wrote.
Kommentar veröffentlichen