To admit my age, I remember the first long-distance phone call I ever made. As a child, I found it almost a Christmas-like experience to be able to talk to a friend who’d moved to another state. A wall-mounted, black telephone with a rotary dial was my lifeline to a disembodied voice. I couldn’t imagine the friend’s new home, her new room, her new school, or her new friends. In fact, I was having a hard time imagining her at all. Her face was dissolving even as we struggled to find still-common ground. I felt that I was speaking to a void.Today, even the folks closest to us are lost in that void. How many face-to-face conversations do we really have?
We text each other from different rooms in the same building. Increasingly, even those disembodied voices on a telephone—most often a cell phone—are a last resort ONLY if texts, emails, or Instant Messages fail. “Facebook” is a verb, we tweet to complete strangers as though we know them, and we invent, by the moment, new electronic connections to remove us from the messy necessity of human contact.
In the click of our mouse, we can “unfriend” someone. And, as growing cybercrime shows, it’s all too easy to create a persona that masks the truth and causes all kinds of malicious possibilities.
All these connections have created a disconnect that makes communication not only disembodied, but frequently anonymous. It’s easy to assume there’s no responsibility or accountability for the words of an online persona. Tragically, many have found otherwise.
There are good things, to be sure, and I love that part of social media especially. Friends long lost are now regularly in my Facebook news feed. But I’m also alarmed that we’re losing the delicate nuances of human interaction, our ability to “know” another in dimensions that require time and space and all of the human senses.
We tweet, we blog, we Facebook, we email, we post. We “talk,” but does anyone hear?
