To all of the mindless digital derelicts of my generation, to all of you Facebookers and MySpacers, to you texters and Tweeters:
Please come back to reality. It can get lonely without you here.
Nobody is going to be mad, or yell at you. We just want you safely back in the real world. We really thought we lost you there for a minute.
You just seemed so happy sitting there with your eyes glazed over, fingers furiously stabbing your laptop, blessing all of your friendsters with the latest updates on how boring your class is. The saddest part was that you seemed completely and utterly oblivious to the fact that there is not one person on Earth who gives the teeny tiniest little nugget of a crap about how bored you are. But there you sat, sending your boredom coursing through the electronic veins of the world.
Do you remember when we used to go out at night? We would talk and laugh and have an awesome time. Now you just sit at the end of every table. Mute. Lost in a quest to bastardize the English language one word at a time. There was a time when I could just sit back and LMFAO every time I got a text message from you. And OMG you’re my BFF, but its gotten to the point where TARFU.
You really haven’t seen reality for a long time. You’ve become so obsessed with electronic interaction that you’ve forgotten how to just interact. But it’s really not your fault.
The Internet and text messaging seem so much easier than actually talking to people on the phone or in person. You can take your time and calculate everything you want to say. Actually talking to people when you could get nervous and say something dumb seems really intimidating. The text message solved everything. Now we can all communicate with someone without ever actually putting ourselves out there.
We all thought that was OK for a while. “It’s technology,” we said. It’s taking over everything anyway. Why not be on the right side of the learning curve? Put the analog anuses in their place! This is the digital age! This is where I can have over a thousand friends on a giant list for everyone to see!
But now it is dawning on the analog people of the world that there are very few people left to interact with. Everyone is checking out of reality in order to live vicariously through his or her Facebook account. Even crowded tables of friends have become eerily silent except for the deafening clicking of digital buttons. All the while, nobody seems to notice what we have lost.
We have lost the passion in translation. Everyone might as well sound like Droopy in a text message. It’s all emotionless monotone. There is nothing beyond the words. You can’t tell if a person is happy or sad. You can’t tell what his or her first reaction is. You can’t tell how a person really feels. You can’t create the emotional bonds that accompany real human connection.
Perhaps, it is not that we have forgotten how to interact. Perhaps, it’s that the world never forced us to learn to interact in the first place. We never had to make those phone calls to the cute one that gave us the number at the party. Just send them a text message. Just “friend” them. We have figured out a way to perpetuate the condition of that first middle school dance where you have a friend ask your crush to dance for you. When we were 12, this fear of embarrassment and rejection was understandable.
But we’re not in middle school anymore. We’re in college. We should be able to hold an adult conversation. We should be able to think on our feet. We should be willing to put ourselves out there, because we should know that is the only way we’re ever really going to get anything back.
So before you start mainlining bandwidth, let’s step back for a minute. Invest a little more time in your real relationships in the real world. Please… just unplug. The rest of us miss you.
Sincerely,
Travis Grogan,
Political science and communications senior
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TylerBranson 2 years, 3 months ago
While the hangover from digital communication practices can be pronounced, particularly if it affects your other face-to-face encounters negatively, I think your overall assessment of technology is grounded in fallacy, conservatism, and a devotion to a time and place in history and sociability that you suppose to be more "authentic." You seem to have forgotten how previous generations usually deplored the technological advances of the current in the name of some type of moral standard. Really it's more of a moral panic. While there are certain pitfalls of digital communication, like the glazed over, impersonality you notice, to accuse social practices of today of "bastardizing" language (as if current standard English isn't a bastardization in one way or another--or that current manipulations of language don't articulate themselves as effectively as other languages), or of not investing time in "real relationships"--you totally overlook some of the more interesting things happening with technology. And you succumb to nativism in the process.
TheJR 2 years, 3 months ago
The text-walkers are the most annoying problem, in my opinion. I constantly have to dodge people on the south oval who don't feel the need to look up from their phones.
dugie 2 years, 3 months ago
Tyler,
You contributed nothing to the conversation.
Way to throw a bunch of buzzwords into a paragraph and call it a "rebuttal".
English is degrading at an alarming rate. That doesn't mean that the next generation will be any less effective at expressing themselves, but these technologies don't really help with the skills we need out in the real world.
Technology helps us connect, but some people get so immersed that they lose the interactions that make up 95% of communication. That's retarded.
The only thing naive is Grogan's use of "mainlining bandwidth" You can't mainline a measure of capacity!
-dugie
William 2 years, 3 months ago
Freaking great article! It feels slightly hypocritical to be commenting on such an article through a text-based internet forum, but I will make the claim that I use internet for little else. I have never had a facebook or myspace or anything like that, and life seems much more personal without it, but I writhe in the narcissism and comforts of technology all the time. Many advantages of technology are indeed a burden to our souls that we should work on releasing ourselves from.
hmartin 2 years, 3 months ago
We need more writing like this: a topic that is actually interesting, and an engaging, reasoned take on that topic.
Two thumbs up.
TylerBranson 2 years, 3 months ago
I don't know what you mean by the "degrading" of language. And I don't buy the fact that before digital communication technology, people were more efficient at "real world skills" than they are now. What type of "real world skills" are being degraded vs skills that are being developed and strengthened? Research shows that contrary to the platitudes of impersonal, glazed over, social networking zombies like the column points out, people, most especially teens, use social networking to facilitate real world relationships they already have--people they already communicate with in the "real world," not to hide behind a digital wall of anonymity. Although anonymity is a particular advantage (or disadvantage) in new media communication. But there are advantages/disadvantages for all types of communication. I guess the point is to take a stand on certain aspects and draw attention to some of the negative effects of digital technologies, because a check is warranted, but also not to find refuge in easy to make, less naunced, gross generalizations and illogical concepts of language degradation. What about online activism, transnational communication, open-source information sharing, or more widespread cosmopolitanism, etc.