Thoughts on Communication (Taken from my Facebook Notes)

It seems that one of the side-effects from being single and living on your own is that you have a great deal of time to think about things. One thing that I've been thinking about lately is how we communicate with people. It seems to me that somewhere along the road, personal forms of communication have fallen by the wayside.

When I was younger, we did have phones in the house but if you wanted to go chat with your friends the best thing to do would be to go
outside and play with or talk with them. Or, in other words, have face-to-face time with them. Yet, as time marches on and new technologies come out we had cell phones availible to the masses. Nowadays I'm not even surprised to see little ten year olds packing cellphones. Still, even while that convenience made it so one could be mobile and doing things while maintaining their 'social network' you still were required to talk and have a conversation with people

Then the next technological 'advance' came forward and someone thought it would be a great idea to enable phones to send little snippets of data containing up to 140 characters between each other. Suddenly to 'talk' to all the people in your social network all you had to do was type in a little sentence with its own language and hit send. You could have more 'conversations' going on at once, however getting a more complex or deeper conversation either involved sending a huge number of texts back and forth, or actually stopping and calling the person. It seems to me that with the advent of texting, many people feel that quantity of conversations is better than the quality.

It was also around this time that social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook started to be catching on in pop culture. Soon many folks started to create their own personalized space for them to customize however they wanted. Then, in near SMS style, they'd post little thoughts of what they might be feeling or what they were up to, etc. While I won't go on about the pseudo or full-blown narcissism some people have because of that, I do want to make mention of how these little posts have created a shortcut in the socializing process. Now, instead of having a conversation (either in person, or on the phone), or even sending a text to someone, all you have to do now is login and get instant notification of what everyone's up to or feeling. No interaction or work necessary! Another feature of these social networking sites is that you can have hundreds of friends on any of these sites, some people who you barely know will send friend requests to you. However, once you have these people added, what then? Does a conversation ensue? Or do you just remain as people you hardly know but will see a status update from every now and again?

Finally, after a few years of Myspace and Facebook, Twitter came on to the scene as the latest social networking site. However instead of having a site and other things that show off personal likes, or whatever, you now have a site where you publically broadcast SMS-sized messages to the world. (or whoever just feels like following you.) Now even the information you want to share about yourself (which can be up to a good-sized paragraph on Facebook) is condensed to a bite-sized nugget.

So, why do I write all of this? While I may yearn for a much simpler life and the way things used to be, technology won't go away. Even I make use of it by writing this little note on Facebook right now. It just feels that as our dependence on this technology increases, our social skills seem to wane. Or, that the friends that we feel like that we have or only friends on the surface and I'm as guilty of that as anyone else. While I wish I could claim that I have all the answers, that'd be a total lie. However, if you're reading this then I challenge you, as I'm challenging myself to have deeper relationships with the people that you know. Have good conversations. God has created us as personal beings, go out there and do what he created you to do.