Only Endless Memory

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

The Age of Disconnection

There has been much talk about how much more in touch people are in this day in age. Everybody and his brother (well, except for me) has a cell phone. Computers are in a large number of homes creating networks of information. Information is available just a web search away.

If you want to talk to discuss something, there are email groups for almost any subject you can think of. Cancer survivors, beagle enthusiasts, fetishists, and dice collectors can all talk with other like-minded people. Players from all over the world log in to mass multiplayer online games and talk in game or use programs like ventrilo or teamspeak to speak to each other in "real time" on voice chat.

We are more connected to each other then ever before, but the more connected we are to each other all over the world, the less connected we seem to be personally. I often see a groups of people walking down the street together and more often then not, it seems that one or more of them are too busy talking on their cell phone or text messaging to actually spend time talking with the person that they are walking with. In stores, I see people in a check out line who barely see the cashier as they are on their cell phone.

Even when I lived with my old roommates, often while we were all in the same room or a room away from each other, we each were playing our games or doing our own things on our respective computers and spent little time actually talking to each other. Myself and many other people I know as well reach out to people across the country and the world through the computer but rarely go out much with friends in "real life."

I have made steps to try to get myself out more and to spend time with new friends, but it is often a struggle. It really is much easier to have the friendships over the computer where there is a certain distance that is maintained through the written or spoken word. For myself, I know it is a choice that I make and it is something that I can see.

What I begin to question, is for the children that have grown up in this age of computers and cell phones, is it a choice? Do they notice the distance they have put between themselves and those around them? I was in the hospital emergency room yesterday and there was a young girl who was sick and had two friends with her. One of her friends, that I believe was there to support her, spent most of the time text messaging someone else.

Is this the present days form of dissociating from the things that are unpleasant or scary to us? Instead of facing the things that bother us, we spend hours living in a world with distanced texts or words on a phone rather then seeing what is in front of us? We spend hours net surfing, watching videos with little or no point, and finding our connections through a filtered screen rather then seeing the faces around us.

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Posted by Badger :: 5:01 PM :: 0 Comments:

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