Opinion/Editorial
INSIDE HUMANITY’S FLOW ALONE
“I am here but I’m not talking to you.” These words are seldom spoken today although they are fully applicable in many more situations than ever before in the history of civilized communications. We all make calls and send emails. We are notified by brilliantly designed technology that our call was received and recorded or delivered, and possibly even read. We’ve hunkered down in a cringing modern acceptance of such behavior that would never have been considered decent only fifty years ago. In those ‘old days,’ when a line was busy, the person on the phone being called was not only busy but also unable to know if anyone was trying to reach them. Pleasant acceptance of this simple fact could be made with a patient understanding that the number would have to be dialed again at a later time.
When the mail was sent there was no immediate expectation of any acknowledgement. The excuse that a written communication was lost in the mail was not uncommon or unacceptable at all, no matter how unlikely. We no longer live in those emotionally acceptable and patient times. We live today, knowing that people are rarely out of communication. People carry cell phones at all times and cell phone coverage is nearly universal worldwide. Voicemail, that device used to direct incoming callers (replacing the answering machine), has harshly taught us all that most calls made and not answered are received by voicemail with the person we’re trying to reach not more than a few feet away if that. We are becoming ever more hardened to this thinly veiled kind of rejection or diminishment of importance. We know we are being deferred for others considered more important and, although we are intensely and deeply angered and hurt, we make believe we are not. We make believe we have come to accept modern times and that these new cold and almost mean-spirited actions are merely part of being a member of a new advanced social order.
Inside we seethe. Way down deep inside. For members of the human species, being ignored or deferred to a position of lesser importance is crushing. More than fifty percent of the American population is on some sort of mood-altering medication. The same percentage of the population is said to be suffering from depression. How much of this high level of medication and diagnosis of mental unhappiness is caused by our newfound and highly touted electronic inventions, said to be great advances in communication? As the current dominating aged population, steeped in formalized communication systems and habits of bygone times, younger generations are coming online and accommodating this new social coldness with a frigidity all of their own.
The younger generations do not leave messages. They don’t listen to messages. They use Caller I.D. to check to see who might have called. They never answer the phone when called. They call back if they find the caller’s I.D. data interesting or important enough to merit a call. Younger people do not check spam-filtered email to see if someone possibly important to them has had an email rejected by a computer program. They feel that they will be found eventually if communication is important. Young people don’t write letters anymore, and the U.S. Post Office is slowly dying because of this simple fact. Writing things on paper and sending them by ‘snail mail’ is simply too ridiculous for younger people.
As we pursue an unruled, untamed, and unforeseen path into the usage of ever more alienating communication tools are we prepared to find ourselves alone? Birth rates, once feared because of their meteoric rise, are now reaching dangerously low levels in developed countries, while those of the third world (lacking the latest communication technology) continue to skyrocket. Modern technology is changing things in ways we will only come to know about as a result. We can’t predict these results, but we can predict that some of them can be cataclysmic.
Once, sitting in a coffee shop, a man was cautioned by a brilliant woman he’d interrupted and corrected twice in her conversation with another woman. She turned with her eagle eyes and high intellect aimed directly at him across the table. “You can be right, and you can be alone,” she stated flatly, before turning back to her friend. Are we, as willing members of this advanced and technologically climbing communication culture, about to be right and alone?