As I write this essay, I realize that I will never be able to witness the face of the reader as they skim down this page for the first time. Does that bother me? No, not necessarily. We as people have been communicating via written messages since the dawn of calligraphy.
For the first time in our evolutionary ladder, humans are adapting for the sake of convenience, the new form of survival. It seems as if life is just one frantic rush to get things done in the fastest and most efficient manner.Few take the time to truly appreciate the company they keep or the moments they experience; the more forms of connection they make available to society, the less personal each connection becomes. People of this generation seem to care more about their persona on the Internet than their persona displayed in real life.
The sad, ironic truth is, through the improvement of communication between each other, we are now more disconnected than ever I’ve come to peace with the fact that humanity, as a collective society is moving towards a more technological form of communication.However, nowadays people seem to be replacing meaningful, evocative messages with short euphemisms or even outright ignorance in order to avoid any form of difficult social confrontation. One prime example of this I have encountered through my old habit of “facebooking” is seeing people end their relationships online, sometimes without the other person even knowing until he or she logs in to find their relationship status changed. These long distance cyber breakups as well as many other tasks are all being done behind the safety of a computer or phone screen.It’s as if humans confide in this virtual realm to shield them from their difficult situations. Such methods could only have negative consequences in the long run when the time comes to face their own problems.
To quote an article I read a few years back, “people’s attention span has been reduced to 140 characters”, the significance being that 140 characters is the maximum allotment on twitter. This shockingly true revelation made me realize that people are progressively adopting a more zombie like form of conversation, one that is disturbingly expressionless.Whole sentences nowadays can be summed into a few acronyms like “ttyl”. It feels as if the English language is being corrupted thanks to “faster communication” where nobody has the time to spend an extra second taxing their fingers to do the laborious job of clicking a few more buttons. However what is more depressing is the toll this new technology era is having on family relations. I remember only a few weeks back my international school had let out for a weeklong break and my family and I had decided to vacation with my cousins in Ireland.
As we all sat down around the dinner table at the most extravagant restaurant within 20 blocks, chatting had soon erupted. To my surprise however, the atmosphere swiftly changed within a few moments and everybody had simultaneously begun to pull out his or her phone. For the next half hour I sat in what felt like one of the most awkward moments of my adolescence and stared as each family member texted away or responded to emails. What had become of quality family time? Had we really flown all the way from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and sat at the best restaurant we could find to check our emails?Tedious occurrences like these are turning into wide spread epidemics. Words such as “textaholic” have formed describing the tendencies of some people to spend nearly every free minute texting rather than conversing in real life.
Pretty soon it seems that face-to-face interactions will come to a standstill. Skype video chat may be the extent of a relationship for some people. We live in a world that is always advancing; it is human nature to want to adapt and excel. However it is crucial that we do not forget to lose our grip on human interaction, for this technology will not last us forever.
