When I was a kid, people talked to each other. If you wanted to see your family or your friends, you had to go to them, they had to come to you, or you had to go to the same place.
When I got older, we talked on the phone. If you needed your parents to come and pick you up from some activity, you had to call them. If you wanted to talk to your friends but didn’t live close by, it was easier to pick up the phone and call and talk for a few hours.
In college, most of my close friends lived within a few miles of me. Our lives and schedules had us crossing paths several times in a typical week. It was great, but most college friendships were fated to be temporary. Someone changes jobs, classes end, someone moves or graduates and the ties are cut. There were still some friendships you held onto, including those precious few that had been there for most of your life: the friends attending different schools in different cities or states, the cousins starting their own families and figuring out the first steps of actual adulthood. At least in my experience, a lot of handwritten letters were exchanged during that time, because none of us wanted to pay for the long distance phone calls unless it was necessary and because e-mail was still something only scientists were using.
When I began working, the only way to stay in touch with friends at school was to once again seek them out and talk to them, or maybe schedule times to get together and visit. If you needed to tell someone something, you wrote a note and put it in their mailbox in the office or left it on their desk if they weren’t there when you went to see them. Once we had e-mail at school, that all changed. People exchanged messages while following their own sets of personal writing conventions and voices, which often led to misunderstandings that wouldn’t have happened with the less convenient face-to-face conversation, but sometimes could fester enough to change a relationship between people, even just a little. And it all led to a bit more personal disconnect.
I had my first e-mail address in 1995 and had no idea what to do with it. I signed up to join an online service (R.I.P., eWorld), and began reaching out to communicate with total strangers, sharing ideas and opinions on message boards, pretending that chat rooms were legitimate substitutions for human interaction, and even playing with the earliest versions of instant messaging. There was a two-way street to this for me: I only know one of the best real-world friends I’ve ever had because of chat rooms and instant messages, and I also stopped talking to one of my sisters less because a few minutes of online chat saved us the time of catching up some other, more meaningful way. Because of these short bursts of virtual interaction, I didn’t notice the distance that was starting to grow between us.
I was never big on chat rooms outside of my early and brief curiosity, but instant messages became important to me, mostly as a way to keep in touch with people I knew who lived far away. And it didn’t make much for the mechanics of instant messaging on a computer to translate into text messaging on a cell phone. I held back from getting a cell phone as long as I could, and by the time I did text messaging was just on the cusp of blowing up. This was back when you had to tap the 1-9 keys multiple times to create the characters you wanted to use, before the luxury of sliding and touch screen keyboards. In the nearly three years since buying my first smart phone, the ratio of text messages I’ve sent to phone calls I’ve made has to be at least 50:1.
I’d argue that social networking has done more to break apart human interaction than enable it. When I login to Facebook, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 135 people on my friends list. Several of those people I see daily, if not weekly. Many I see a handful of times each year. Some I haven’t spoken to in a decade and it’s quite possible I never will again. But they are my Facebook friends because of whatever links us together, and because of social networking I’m able to stay in touch with what’s going on in their lives, or at least with what they choose to share with me. The funny thing is I’ve noticed that it’s more the rule than the exception that when information is put up on Facebook (or in text messages, or in whatever other types of virtual communication I haven’t kept up with because I’m sure there’s a lot), it rarely is ever addressed again in real life.
Take Summer Vacation here, for example. Some things I post about here are stupid or ridiculous and some are admittedly self-indulgent, but there are the rare occasions when some are deeply personal. And I’m not always someone who readily shares what’s deeply personal. But if I feel there’s something I really want to express, this seems like a good avenue for that. However, I know that a limited number of people are ever going to read whatever I write here. And maybe if I have someone or a particular audience in mind when I write something, there are no guarantees they are ever going to see it. But once I write what I need to write the need is purged, and unless the topic ever comes up in real life as a reference to something I write here (which is somewhere between rare and never), whatever thoughts or ideas I wanted to share will have, at least from my perspective, have been shared. It could be out for the whole Internet to see if they were enterprising enough to find it, but maybe the five people I wanted to see it never will. So I admit, I’m just as guilty as anyone else as taking advantage of virtual communication as an easier, more convenient, and potentially less risky way to open up.
I asked for a book at Christmas this past year about The Singularity. It’s a theory I’m fascinated with, about how technology is advancing so rapidly in the 21st century that in a matter of decades it will have evolved to a point where humanity and technology will become so interrelated it will be hard to tell where the technology ends and the person begins. When I think about how many of my students are walking around with cell phones in their pockets, it makes me wonder if such an idea is all that impossible.
