"NO. Put your phone down, and don't text him again, trust me." I overhear from the booth behind me while I'm seated at a diner. I don't mean to ear hustle, but the two friends are being loud, I have good hearing, and I'm eating alone and need some entertainment. "What if it just didn't go through? I don't want him to think I'm ignoring him" the other one chimes back. "It's OK, if he wants to talk to you, he'll text you again." I know this is a very common scenario, and without delving into the matter of double standards, I just want to explore how I think communication has suffered as a result of technology combined with current social norms.
Maybe I'm completely wrong here, romanticizing a time that I haven't lived in, but there's something that always fascinates me about the good 'ole days. No, it's not the music, the porous justice system, or the significant doses of cocaine in Coca-Cola beverages. It's the fact that communication was a little more difficult, and ironically, easier.
I know, we've all seen the old sitcoms and movies where the guy waits a few days to the call the girl or vice versa. That's just courtship and the whole "game" so to say. I want you to think about how the children born in the 90's like me interact.
Nowadays, everyone seems to have a smartphone, and with it comes a fluidity that wasn't afforded in, say, the 70s. It's so easy to send a text to someone and back out of a plan. Our technology has made life tremendously easier, and helps keep people from worrying about our well-being when we are unable to make an appointment.
Naturally, this flexibility is abused. It has more deeply embedded the notion that if something better comes along, we flee from our current obligations towards it.
Standards for a good friendship become watered down, and we harm ourselves and others as a result. Kids who grow up with a cellphone as an extension of themselves believe that "double-texting" is for the birds. This perception of being a "try-hard" or overly exerting oneself is for the birds. On the surface, it all seems superficial and childish, and all the while it's nothing new, but the ease that we're afforded in such menial tasks as making a lunch appointment with a friend has also caused an ironic and humor-backed sense of misanthropy.
With an illuminated glass panel between us and the rest of the world, we can be extremely selective, and ultimately protective of ourselves. We've hyper-extended the childhood consolations of "there'll always be someone/something else out there" to the point of missing out on all of the someones and somethings.
One of my favorite comedians, Louis C.K. made light of these mannerisms, saying that back in the day, if you made plans, and the other party didn't show up, you'd think they were dead or something. Nowadays, a last minute white lie creates an escape portal instantly, and may even provide relief for the other party, because something better also came up for them.
These toys that we've been given... they're still relatively new, shiny, and very distracting. It's definitely not all bad, and a lot of the discomfort and confusion may just come from the clashing of our human wiring versus the external wiring that we've adopted.
On the flip-side, many people will say anything because face-to-face interaction is subtracted. Sure, it can be annoying to read such reckless musings on a timeline all the time, but this is evidence that there's a counterbalance to the evasiveness. I guess we're finding the balance in using our resources. When given a lot, one tends to splurge, and that's how it is. If we reverted to sending written letters, we'd be more deliberate with our words and the plans that we construct, leaving no reason to flake out.
No, this isn't a wish for a utopian system of interaction. It's just a scattered stream of thought, just like the others you see. The drama is interesting, the watered down words typed on a screen train you to detect the vocal variants, and the online debates create a desire for research.
So maybe it is the time honored social norms that prevented that girl from double-texting, or maybe it was a loss of signal that brought that situation to the surface in the first place, or maybe it was a far off and unrelated impetus. Whatever the case may be, there's really no excuse not to communicate.
