Connectivity is overrated
Image by illustration by yours truly
I just walked into subway to get my five dollar foot long. It's cheap, healthy AND delicious.
As I was filling up my half sweet/half unsweet tea I looked around the restaurant. There were three people in there eating their late lunches and staring at their mobile devices. They're reading e-mails or checking the news or adding friends on Facebook or even letting the twittersphere know that they're eating lunch at Subway. A question hit me like a pile of bricks.... is this a good thing? Are they really more connected?
These days there are more ways than ever to stay in touch, to communicate and to form connections. So are we? I remember a day when you would walk into a restaurant like Subway and people would look up from their food and greet you with a smile or even just passing eye contact. It seems those days are over. The era of virtual connectivity has put an end to spontaneous human connection.
At least at 2 o'clock pm on a Friday in Subway.
Comments
I'm surprised to not see "written on my iPhone" at the end of your post.
I don't mind it in a Subway, but I do mind it in places that are meant to be social. It's so sad to see half the patrons of a coffee shop or bar head down, staring at little screens.
The addiction to connectivity will probably be listed as a disease in the next Manual of Mental Disorders.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the last year or so. Things like e-mail and IM I get - they're electronic adaptations of snail mail and conversations. But are there pre-Internet equivalents of Facebook or Twitter?
I think this trend has made our communication more unidirectional, and when we do still have conversations, they're a series of tweets that span 24 hours for what could be shared in five minutes, face-to-face.
Does this also have implications for our thought patterns? Down the road, as we try to sustain twenty or more conversations simultaneously (one tweet at a time), will we lose our minds or our ability to focus? Already, I have trouble talking to some people in person - they get a tweet on their phone and can't help but addictively respond, fragmenting our *real* conversation.
@ John
Since I wrote this just before the new iOS4 was released, and spellcheck was non-existent on the iPhone, there was no way I'd write anything work-related on that phone. Now that it has spellcheck capability, I guess I'm free to write things that matter on my iPhone. I'm not sure that's a good thing. It looks like I'll be face down in a Subway working through my lunch before you know it!
@Harrison
You're absolutely right. It took me four days to respond to John's comment and three hours to respond to yours. This whole fragmented conversation thing seems to be an entirely new communication paradigm that has no precedent in human history.
Fragmentation is prevalent throughout all social media outlets (facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc). I personally dislike the fragmented nature of it, but let's look at the bright side... you and I would probably have never called, IMed or emailed each other to have this discourse. So, the fact that our conversation will be fragmented due to the nature of the medium (a blog) is acceptable to me, because otherwise we probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to enlighten each other.
What really gets me riled up is the last part you mentioned, people are ADDICTED to the fragmented communication outlets. They don't know when to turn it off and re-engage in traditional, linear, succinct, all-in-one-sitting conversations. Several of my friends, that I used to truly enjoy having meals with are seemingly incapable of linear, self-contained conversations these days. We used to plow through an in-depth self-contained conversations. Now, twitter and facebook (and other applications they have given permission to buzz them when someone has an update) continually interrupt them. Maybe I'm just not as interesting as friend updates or the latest tweets, or maybe, just maybe, they don't know how to unplug from the matrix.
Either way, I know their ability to hold in-depth self-contained conversations has been hampered, and I'm quite annoyed by it.
PS. When hanging with said friends, I'm often distracted by eBay auctions that are expiring, but that is time sensitive (bid now or lose), so I get a bye, right?! Oh the hypocrisy!
There are people studying what this techniology does to or brains. Look for "The Shallows",
www.amazon.com
"Here he looks to neurological science to gauge the organic impact of computers, citing fascinating experiments that contrast the neural pathways built by reading books versus those forged by surfing the hypnotic Internet, where portals lead us on from one text, image, or video to another while we’re being bombarded by messages, alerts, and feeds."
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