The thing that's on my mind most this week is communication...or more specifically, the lack thereof. We have slowly begun to lose our ability to actually communicate things. We rely on our technological advances to assist us with communicating and we don't remember what it's like to say things face to face. Yeah. Huge problem.
Communication is essential to our success as people. We can't get anywhere in life without communicating with someone. We communicate with random people on a daily basis. We communicate with people at the grocery store, or at a restaurant, or through our jobs. That kind of communication is fairly easy. It doesn't make us delve any deeper than what's on the surface..."small talk". The communication I'm talking about is meaningful conversations with people we care about or that care about us. That kind of communication has been disappearing from our lives.
Think about the last time you had a real, in depth conversation with someone. Not the texting or over the phone kind of conversation, but the kind where you're sitting in a room together talking. It doesn't happen much anymore. That kind of contact is left to mobile phones and online social networking. We have "in-depth" conversations with our computers and phones. The question then becomes: why do we spend so much time texting, tweeting, and facebooking when we run much less risk of being misunderstood or misrepresented if we'd just visit with someone?
I think that we are losing our communication skills because we are losing our courage and becoming too dependent on devices that let us "stay connected". Let me start with the losing our courage part. I believe that we are losing courage because we don't have to use it anymore. I've always been taught, and have unfortunately had the chance to prove to myself, that if you don't use a gift, you lose the ability to use it. I play the piano. I find it difficult to play things that used to be easy if I don't practice with some form of regularity. Math? I hated it in school and dropped it outside of school. Now it's murder to try and do some of the things I was taught. The same holds true for courage.
Eleanor Roosevelt said: "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'" This kind of applies to communication and today's societal view of communication. When you're face-to-face with someone, you see every facet of their features. If you're good at it, you can tell what a person is thinking just by looking at them. Here's how it ties into courage: When you tell someone how you feel, you have to be witness to the reaction. Not every reaction is good. For me, communicating what I think and feel is difficult because I don't like making people unhappy, and that includes myself. The risk that someone will be hurt is always something I consider and why I often keep my mouth shut.
For example, I went to see an old friend of mine at the end of last year. It was on the way home from visiting my family in Utah, and I hadn't seen him in 11ish years. I was okay with just sitting and listening to him tell me about his life. He was not. He wanted me to talk about my own life. We had been interested in each other, as much as is possible at 13 and 14, and that played a part in what I was willing to say and what I was nervous to divulge. As a result, I spent a lot of the time trying to figure out what to say. The fact that I couldn't say anything was odd for both of us. Why? We'd reconnected on Facebook and had no problems talking over emails and text messages. We both said a lot then. In person, I was very aware of the risk I took by telling him anything that might have meant something. It was terrifying and I was afraid of his reaction. I chickened out. You're gonna laugh at me if you haven't already when I tell you what happened next. When I left, I sent him a text and told him I wasn't normally like that and that I owed him a better night next time I came through. I couldn't even tell him that when I was leaving. I had to wait until I was on my way home and there was no risk I might get hurt.
Don't worry. I'm laughing at myself.
The reasons I listed earlier for our lack of communicating abilities are kind of dependent on each other. I don't believe it's a good idea to blame a decline in our society on the advancement in technologies because I don't believe guns kill people. In my opinion, technology is like a gun. It is a tool that assists someone in doing something less than savory. In this case, because we are so dependent on our technology, it causes a loss in courage like I already discussed. Let me elaborate on the technology end a little even though I've already touched on it.
- In 1900, telephones were scarce. It had been invented almost 30 years earlier, but phone lines didn't stretch the continent like they do now. They were becoming more prominent in major cities, but communication was still dependent on face to face and letter carriers.
- In 1915, Alexander Graham Bell made the first trans-continental phone call from New York to San Fransisco.
- In 1942, the first electronic digital computer was built by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry
- In 1947, AT&T developed the North American Numbering Plan that assigned phone numbers to individuals. Meaning that was the birth of the 10-digit phone number.
- Also in 1947, the first mobile phones were invented though not sold commercially.
- In 1956, the first computer hard disk was used.
- In 1958, the computer modem was invented. That same year saw the invention of the integrated circuit.
- In 1959, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce both invented the microchip.
- In 1962, Spacewar became the first computer video game invented.
- 1968 saw the invention of the first computer mouse by Douglas Engelbart, the first computer with integrated circuits, and random access memory (RAM) by Robert Dennard.
- In 1969, we saw the beginnings of the massive outlet that is the Internet in arpanet.
- In the 70's, we were given the floppy disk by Alan Shugart, the word processor, Pong the video game, the Ethernet cable by Robert Metcalfe and Xerox, cell phones and the cray supercomputer by Seymour Cray.
- Here's the list of advances in the 80's: MS-DOS and the IBM-PC were '81, The Apple Lisa in '83, the CD-ROM and the Apple Macintosh in '84, Windows by Microsoft in '85, and digital cell phones in '88.
- And finally, the '90's and 2000's: the World Wide Web, Internet protocol (HTTP), and WWW language (HTML) were created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990; the first text message was sent in '92; the Pentium processor was invented in '93; the Java computer language and DVD were invented in '95. ; Web TV was '96; 2001 saw the creation of the iPod; Phone tooth by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau came in 2002; Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg and Intel Express Chips were 2004; YouTube by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim came into being in 2005;
It is part of the human experience to experience what technology doesn't allow us to. What's the point of living a life where there is no confrontation or no reason to risk everything? That's what these social media and texting outlets are leading us too. In a world where we don't have to face someone and TALK to them, who would choose to do exactly that? It's much safer to hide behind a phone or a website. There is no chance of letting someone see the damage they've done that way. I, myself, am more inclined to say what I feel behind the safety of a phone or website. Realizing what I have in writing this and doing my research for it, that's not all I want to do anymore. There's a strange exhilaration in communicating the way we were meant too. I dare you too try it. Put aside your phone and your facebook and tell someone something important. It doesn't matter what the outcome is. The fact that you have courage enough to attempt it is all you're looking for. That way, the next time you need to talk to someone, you won't be afraid.
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