Vicissitudes and Victories

Impersonality

I might be wrong, but I think that the technical expansion of communication possibilities has made our lives more impersonal. Gone are the days when suitors spent hours carefully crafting a love letter until every word rang like poetry in the heart of their beloved. Cell phones allow us to communicate whenever we want, but I think that phone conversations have become more superficial. Email is convenient and quick, but it facilitates short, thematic conversations. Text messaging and instant messaging can be flirtatious and witty, but it is rarely substantial. Even the act of blogging for me is interestingly impersonal. I do express some of my deepest and most poignant emotions and thoughts in this medium, but very few of you even know who I am and probably even more don't even care. Reading blogs gives us the opportunity to understand what is going on inside the mind of someone else without ever really having to get to know them on a person to person level.

So what exactly am I bemoaning? I think that in the future people will look back and think of our time as a time when the art of conversation and writing declined. It is the age of short attention spans and fast-paced entertainment. It is an age without imagination--at least outside of movies and video games. I think the people of the future will picture our time as an era when people communicated with each other more, and knew each other less. In short, I believe that someday we will be seen as having lived in the age of impersonality.

posted by Joel @ 4:25 PM