a private conversation
Friday, Mar. 12, 2004
@ 12:33 a.m.
On one of my many recent trips down memory lane, I recounted to an employee that when I was her age we had to plan all social interactions in advance -- much to her amazement, I'm sure*. But if you're old enough, you'll remember that if you wanted to talk to someone on the phone, you had to hope they were near one when you called. Some nights you would sit, physically, beside one, hoping that it would ring. When someone ignores a text message, it can't possibly compare to the helplessness and frustrated anger we felt when we couldn't get a hold of the person we wanted to speak with. We would waste an entire evening, waiting. In the dark. You had to really want to interact, to interact. Today's generation can find the answer to almost any question by running a well-formed Google search. The atrocious handwriting I find in my time off request book would make my grandmother faint. Laws have been passed to deter us from TYPING while driving -- my first computer almost broke the desk it sat on! And if I wanted to edit the text, I had to rewrite everything below the character I was changing. Overwrite FROM HELL with a green, blinking cursor on a black screen. But despite all the advancements in our modes of communication (personally, I can text a message, call someone or send an email/picture/link/money to a friend using a device that fits comfortably into my pocket) I feel that I can say with certainty that the quantity and speed of our communication has far outdistanced the quality of our interaction. Talking in thousands of miles. It's everywhere. It's normal. Kids in groups, phones in hand, effectually ignoring their peers to tweet about how stoked they are to hang out with their peers. A couple on a walk, one with an ear to a phone and the other silent (or texting, or also on the phone). Fifty facebook updates from someone we haven't been in contact with for several years -- but by reading, we feel we have a grasp on what's happening in their life. How can we excuse ourselves for ignoring what's happening to talk about what's happening? Is texting in someone else's company any less polite than having a private, whispered conversation in front of that someone? If my curtains were open and you watched me for five minutes every day through the window while I staged a rehearsed display of what I wanted you to see...would you know who I am? Honesty is a basic necessity in healthy human interaction. When somebody qualifies what they have to say with 'to tell the truth', or 'honestly', you should probably be convinced of only one thing: that anything they said prior to that or without qualifying it as truthful might very well have been a lie. If we used LOL as an actual gauge of our reaction, every public place would ring with forced, hysterical laughter at all times. And it would be strange, wouldn't it? Socially bizarre. Human jackals, forging dishonest human interactions. Try this: if you're out with someone else, put away your phone and give some real time to just them. If you're at the dinner table, don't answer your phone -- we wouldn't do this at dinnertime in my house, even when that elusive landline call did come through. Maybe try to make it through the day without texting someone you love. Or spend less time on facebook reading what I want you to read. I'm a lot less interesting than I appear. For the first time in a long time, commit your whole self to a private conversation. And throw in a little eye contact. If you can stand it. (*Probably not.)