Communication

I just watched the movie ‘Avatar’ and I realized how much technology has made a mess of the lines of communication. Don’t ask me how a bad two dimensional movie with largely unresolved superficial themes and negative plot developments, caricatures and almost zero substantial character development and nothing to link the story progressions leads to the idea of communication. It’s the ADHD addled brain. In the last ten years alone, the advent of cell phones and instant messaging has completely reformed the ways in which we separate ourselves from proper communication. They have become added layers to shield the communicants from that crucial humanness of a connection.

It used to be that you could pick up a phone when you were in bored disposition or looking for a conversation and you would most likely find one on the other end of the line. And that was just that. Now, phone calls either become professional or intimate. Professionally, all forms of communication are for the sake of getting work done, however on the other side in the realm of personal calls, they have become intimate things. If it’s between chums it’s alright, between a person of the opposite sex, she automatically assumes you have some ulterior motive. Whatever happened to just being friends?

Last time, you could just ring up the person strictly for a conversation and no one would go away assuming anything. It was just talking, like at a social gathering. Nowadays to get to that stage requires first spending much time talking over text messages. Text talking as you might call it. It’s horribly removed from humanity. The texts are just words that you read, secondary to the speech itself. 65% of all human communication is non-verbal, which leaves you the remaining 35%. If you applied those statistics to sight, you would be considered legally blind! Furthermore if you have ever examined a live speech vs text you will notice the great disparity in the amount of words used. A person talking has so much more tools at his disposal; he has tone, timing, rhythm, emphasis, onomatopoeia, emotion, and cadence. For him to indicate on a basal level say how much he abhorred a particular restaurant with great malice, he could probably just say ‘I hate this place!’ with much emotion and aggression, in a spiteful tone. As you can see, for me to explain how he might say those few words requires many more words than actually saying it. If he reproduced this over text verbatim, it wouldn’t really put the message across would it? The reader might probably pass it off as a passing comment.

Yet today, we are continually drawn to the allure of blindness. I think it is because we find safety in blindness, in the delayed responses. It is pitiful to think that spontaneous conversation and communication, what we were born with the ability to do, is so difficult that we prefer to hide behind a screen. The time it takes to reply and the time that passes between each reply can easily turn a fruitful ten minute conservation into a forty minute text conversation complete with misinterpretations. It is a small consolation for the attention we desire, not to mention it completely mutilates our normal conversational patterns. How many times have we waited by the phone for a reply that we could have gotten ten minutes ago with a phone call or added ‘haha’ to a text in order that it not be misinterpreted as a serious matter, or to indicate a teasing statement in order not to insult the receiving party? The use of ‘lol’ means I may find this amusing, but doesn’t actually mean the person is laughing… smileys fail to adequately convey the many degrees of expression we have. In fact if you cannot convey the emotions you are feeling through your vocabulary and sentence structure you may be required to return to school for English lessons. However that said, sometimes the reader too fails to interpret it, or curses such long text messages drawn out to highlight specifically the feelings of the sender.

Somehow, I am also curious as to why we desire to avoid the human voice, the sound is melodious to the ear (bearing that it doesn’t come from those we detest), the laughter, the joy, the tones of emotion add to life. So why do we avoid it? We crave these sounds, the desire for bonds and company. We built tribes and societies so we wouldn’t be alone yet in the concrete jungle we have inadvertently isolated ourselves more from the world than ever with the use of fiber-optic cables, routers and servers. What does mean for us in the future? We are people who hastily disconnecting ourselves internally as we connect externally. It’s quite a curious ironic thing isn’t it? If you have any explanations do email me.

And maybe if you want to talk to someone today, don’t text them. Pick up the phone, and indulge in their voice.