Music speaks volumes to anyone who listens and the same happened while I was listening to my new favourite song with my head buried into my phone. As the song wound down, having fulfilled its purpose of entertaining me, I slowly raised my eyes to the other inhabitants in the room. What flooded my vision was a scene that has now become a norm, in not only my home but in most. Four adults sat before me, heads buried in a screen all making social connections of their own on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and various other technological marvels. At that moment Charlie Puth’s Lyrics that I’d just heard replayed in my mind like the background music in a movie because truly, ‘We don’t talk anymore, like we used to do’.
Our newly canonised Saint Teresa of Calcutta famously said ‘The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved’. This feeling has led to one of the greatest paradoxical inventions of all time “ social media. I have written about this before and I can’t help going there again, because we have again allowed something that was created to bring positive change, deplete from the environment one of the greatest powers that has been bestowed on human kind. Plain, simple, pure as it is or should I say…was… yes, what we have lost in this ‘web’ is our ability to communicate. Social media has turned us into social misfits. It has made us feel powerful behind a screen and almost antisocial without it. Slowly, we have isolated ourselves from real human contact hiding behind the excuse of the number of friends we have amassed over the web. And thus the paradox I was talking about. Something that was made to bring people together has actually ripped us completely apart.
A common complaint among adults is that their children have no time to speak to them as they are always on their phones and iPads and iPods and tabs. Well dear adults, same to you. With the way technology is changing, no one can actually say they haven’t been bitten by the virtual bug. Be it watching videos on YouTube or finding explanations to common problems on Google or even reading a digital book, everyone has jumped onto some form of technological bandwagon and the result, ‘we don’t talk anymore’. Just a few days ago I was out with friends and there we all were… happily chatting with our ‘other’ friends and on the table in the corner sat a picture perfect family of three. As the little one climbed helter-skelter tripping the poor waiter every time he passed, the angel’s parents looked busy catching up with their correspondence from where we were sitting. I think, even in social gatherings with family we hide behind those screens because most of us seem to be afraid that we have actually forgotten how to talk to other human beings using our mouths and our very own voice boxes.
Not only social media, but all forms of it seem to be replacing one on one human interaction. Sometimes we can go days sitting behind closed doors because we have allowed our brains to get tricked into thinking they are actually communicating, sitting there behind a screen. Communication and language is our unique gift that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Now we have started muting ourselves and letting our voices fade into the dark recesses of the World Wide Web. Communication is so much more than words being strung together. It is expression with body mind and soul. It is an activity that actually involves two or more people entering dialogue and expressing themselves through their voices, gestures and eyes. When we have a really great conversation with another human being (Face to Face) the experience leave memories which are vivid. Yeah sure we can have riveting discussions over the net as well but we all know it’s not the same. The whole feeling of being in that moment with another person, of together experiencing the sights, the sounds, the smells. The knowledge that being there, speaking is a visual memory that will last a lifetime. These are the small things that make face to face conversation beautiful. Yes, we have forgotten what it really feels like to have real conversation. Sometimes it’s even scary as we are so used to keeping things short for the gadgets we use. How about giving conversation of the traditional kind a try once in a while. Really ‘switching off’ your gadget just so that you can actually ‘tune in’ to life. Why live in the know of ‘We don’t talk anymore’ when you can switch to talking ‘like we used to do’?
