The Hazard of Hyperconnectivity

I feel sorry for kids today trying to develop relationships with all the technology available.  Just think, you are able to know where someone is at all times via the Find Friends app; you can communicate constantly and instantly with anyone on your Contact List; and you have intimate knowledge of your "friends" deepest thoughts about politics, sports, food and so much more via FaceBook.  I'm not sure any of this is a good thing.  It seems that maybe we've lost the ability to have face-to-face meaningful conversations.

 

Now, before you go all "she's-too-old-and-doesn't-get-it" on me let me direct your attention to a piece of an essay written by my oldest child.  Adam is 27 years old and this is only part of what he has to add to this discussion:

 

It is perhaps the most sinister aspect of what feels like a uniquely technology- and post-9/11-informed brand of alienation to someone of my personality profile that two of its most debilitating manifestations – a general lack of focus (traditionally blamed on ADHD or ADD or Starbucks or whatever the latest study picked up by USA Today reports) and a weakened ability to express oneself eloquently and meaningfully due to the reduction in time and effort required to produce a message and the gradual shortening of the message length itself – have so effectively prevented me from elaborating on its causes, its markers, its miseries, and its possible solutions for so long. Rather than confront and develop a strategy for dealing with a phenomenon that I believe has adversely affected every last one of my relationships – romantic or otherwise – since early high school, I have spent over ten years struggling, suffering, and occasionally acting out jealously, angrily, and irrationally due to breakdowns in technological communication, communication otherwise affected by a critical reliance on technology, or the existence of virtual “other lives” we all must now maintain and keep separate and selectively private if we wish to be kept in the ambiguous loop of various goings-on.
 

Paradoxically, another part of what has made confronting the phenomenon so difficult has been our insistence that supposedly meaningful communication via the various media in question is not something to be taken seriously. I hold that it is and almost always has been: “Facebook is no place to get political;” “I don’t want to hear about your latest text message fight;” “I’m tired of reading blog posts about arguments on Twitter;” all of the above are the dismissive mantras of a people in denial that their most raw, emotional, and meaningful exchanges no longer take place chiefly in person, where body language, eye movements, hand gestures, accents, and tone of voice contribute to better and more humanized understandings of messages and viewpoints, but rather safely behind a hazy screen of "anonymity" through which messages are rendered into a series of digital dots and beamed down to our little devices and computer screens for us to make sense of with all of our (or all of my) attendant neuroses and hangups about the minutiae of human communication.
 

Since my mid-teens, I have spent countless nights staring at my ceiling waiting for a text. I have spent more tense moments than I care to remember sitting nervously across the table from a girl, wondering to whom she is sending a message, and whether it is okay to ask (I have learned the hard way that it is not). I have had to repeat myself thousands of times, and others have had to repeat themselves for me. I have wondered nervously about what this or that text means. I have wondered why a period and not an exclamation point. I have wondered why one exclamation point and not two. I have wondered why no emoticon, or why not a more emotive one. I have missed sunsets, unforgettable scenery, faces of passersby, oncoming cars, beautiful songs, and hilarious jokes. I have screamed and cried. I have been tempted to pry where my eyes do not belong, and I have succumbed to such temptations. I have been at the end of my rope, I have cursed the age in which I was born, and I have begged and pleaded to be taken back to an earlier time. Never, I realize, has the anxiety paradoxically plaguing and propelling my existence had a more tangible face than the one that stares up at me blankly from my lap in a dark movie theater or begs me to check it while I write this essay.

 

Trust me, he is not alone.  Many young people suffer with this phenomenon or suffer from it and are unaware of how hyperconnectivity affects their relationships.  So, what's a person to do?  This oldster has a few ideas:

 

1.  Use FaceBook as a way to inform people about the common happenings of your life.  That means pictures your family might be interested in or updates for those who live far away and want to know how you're doing.  No politics, no angst, no over-sharing.  Please.

 

2.  Never, ever, ever have an important conversation over Text Message, FaceBook, or even E-Mail.  Important conversations should be face-to-face if at all possible.  That is all.

 

3.  When you are with people who matter to you put your phone away.  Turn your phone off if the temptation to look at it is too great but at a minimum put it away.  The message you receive, the game you play, the update you are looking at cannot possibly be more important than the actual people you are with.  You are saying something when you have your face in your mobile device during a conversation.  Be aware of the messages you are sending to the people actually in your presence.

 

4.  Write a letter.  Yeah, I said "Write a letter".  This is quickly becoming a lost art.  The summer before my daughter got engaged she and her future fiancé worked in separate states and he did not have Internet access.  Their only way to communicate was one phone call a week (when he came out of the mountains and had cell phone service) and the letters they wrote to one another.   Can you imagine what you might say in a letter to someone  you love if that were the only way to communicate?  I bet you can't imagine it but give it a try and write it down in a letter.  Seal it with a kiss.

So, the big walk away point of this blog?  When it comes to relationships, technology has it's place (what on earth did we do to find one another in the mall before we had cell phones?) but nothing can replace a face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball conversation with someone you care about sans distractions.  Don't use technology to stalk, bully or be fake.  Keep it in its place.....it's a tool so don't be one.