I’m changing things up. Texts and emails are out. Handwritten notes and phone calls are in. I’m ditching devices and emails for convenience and replacing with personal service. It’s got to be an improvement over where things are right now.
I miss phone calls. And letters. And people that just knock on the door because they’ve decided to pop over for a visit.
I miss looking someone in the eye when I have a conversation with them. Most often times, I chat to someone’s forehead while they check their email on their smartphone.
I miss having conversations that don’t contain three letter acronyms – I don’t ever remember using the word LOL while speaking, anyway.
I miss thank you notes.
I miss catching up with someone and not using the phrase “I saw on Facebook that you …”
While I appreciate the expediency and ease by which we can connect with others through social and electronic media, I mourn the loss of a society that communicated. Really communicated.
I blame Twitter for the overall reduction in attention span. Somehow we’ve learned to write in concise 140 character “tweets,” unfortunately, we’ve also stopped paying attention to written words that exceed that length. If you don’t believe me, try putting some important information at the end of your next email.
I blame the internet, overall, for providing a venue whereby communication has thrown off any appearance of class and gentility in a society where its members sit behind screens in a protective cloak of anonymity. Careless thoughts that would never cross our lips in spoken conversations will trickle through our fingers via the keyboard to be eternally incised into electronic history as soon as the “enter” button is pushed.
We’ve become immune, or hardened to the effect our hastily clicked words have on others. It’s too easy to quickly type or text out a snippy response to someone before cooling down.
I miss letters. Handwritten ones. Ones that do not have half the words shortened into some sort of elementary school kid code and “CUL8TR” is nothing more than some random typographical error.
I miss the days when my email inbox was actually filled with a thoughtful note from a friend instead of the spewing of spam, email “blasts” and scams designed to part me with my money.
When I hear Facebook referred to as “social media” I can’t help but laugh with bitterness – Facebook has to be damn near the most Anti-Social mechanism in existence. It’s great for finding people you’ve lost contact with, but it is a very poor substitute for maintaining a real social connection with anyone else. It provides us with a false sense of community – for example, I have over 1600 “friends.” Now I sure as heck don’t have 1600 friends in real life. What I have is 1600 people who are in some way associated with someone associated with someone else I may or may not have met in person.
That’s about as good as it gets.
And that’s not good enough for me.