Walking through a mall with a friend recently, I noticed a group of 20-somethings huddled together as if unified toward a common goal...feverishly tapping on the latest technology...Blackberrys, iPhones, PDA's of every sort. I nudged my friend and asked her if she had ever seen anything like it. She, being 40-something like me, said she had...unfortunately. Her experience had been at her home watching her teen aged daughter and her friends. She said they were all sitting in her living room next to each other, television glaring, with the sound turned up high...looking down at their IM devices...texting...other people, of course. She said the "clicking" of their fingers on the keys of their phones was louder than the television. In some strange way, I told my friend, it sounded like a surreal experience...or at least something out of a Stephen King novel.
Truth be told, I am awe-struck by technology. Little gadgets that can send messages around the world in a blink of an eye, keep time in 40 different countries, navigate directions to a favorite pizza joint, access e-mail (which is a wonder in and of itself) and play 1200 favorite "iTunes" all available for just a few hundred dollars at any reputable retail store. But, I am something of a skeptic. I grew up with "snail mail"...didn't own a computer until I was 30 years old...grasped the concepts quickly, but with trepidation, and I miss getting real, honest-to-goodness letters in my mailbox every now and then. I'm not a techie, but I'm not a dinosaur either-I have a cool cell phone, too. But there is something scary to me about our world growing more "global" and our personal space bubbles getting bigger...all the time. How is it we can send e-mail, text messages, IMs and the like, in nano-seconds, but we are beginning to lose our conversational skills? When was the last time you called someone on the phone just to "talk"...or wrote a letter to someone special that didn't have emoticons included?
I don't know, it's just a thought...
We just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the moon landing which happened in July, 1969. It was the summer before my second grade school year and I remember sitting in amazement in front of an old Zenith television console in our living room as my family and I witnessed the great event. I remember how proud we all felt as the now late Walter Cronkite talked us through each task of the astronauts as they readied themselves for the landing. The American public at large knew "squat" about technology in those days. That kind of stuff was for scientists, military and "egg-heads" with horn-rimmed glasses. But we were astounded by the sheer symmetry of the lunar module, the astronauts' cool suits...the sounds that were being broadcast to us from space.
It was an amazing time. It was the beginning, at least to me, of our long lasting love of all things technical. We climbed uphill from there reaching technological heights that we have witnessed to this day.
My fear about our seeking more and better technology, however, is that somewhere along the way we became more isolated as people, more distant in our human relationships...less able to interact on a one-to-one basis. Our personal space, for all of our gadgets, has enlarged. We artificially communicate with techie toys, but we no longer interact with our words, our hands, our hearts...Could our human interaction be the frontier we must now explore?
I don't know...it's just a thought.
