Our
Fingertip Society
One of the
purest forms of expression is through communication. Language, though
it varies throughout every culture, is the main way we humans
interact with each other. However, over the centuries, we have come
across new ways of communicating, ones that are more simple and
accessible to modern civilization. Though I use these advanced forms
of connection, I also realize that they are turning us into a
fingertip society.
When I was growing up, you either
spoke to people in person, over the phone, or through a letter. While
the letter was rather rare, the phone seemed to be the most common
choice of contact, with speaking face to face very close behind.
However, with the growth of the Internet (or Interweb as I so enjoy
calling it) we now tend to lean more towards a less vocal means of
expression. With the introduction of email and instant messaging,
there is now less need for us to speak through our mouths, as it is
much simpler to type a message that will be received within a second.
Cell phones seemed to make phones important again, but with the
addition of text messaging people once again chose to use their
fingertips to talk rather than their voices. Now, I’m one of the
most shy people out there, I’ve never hid that fact, and I hate
talking on the phone, but I enjoy hearing another human voice chat
back to me rather than some tone letting me know that a friend has
messaged me back. Messaging is much easier for shy people, there’s
no doubt about it, but aren’t we lowering our public social skills
by constantly resorting to an electronic form of alphabetical text
communication?
I recently (well, it won’t be all that
recent by the time this article is released) asked a beautiful female
friend of mine about why people don’t talk much on the phone
anymore and she had a simple answer: laziness. People don’t feel
like using their voices anymore, they’d rather jam away at a
keyboard when expressing themselves. As ridiculous as this answer is,
it’s true, and that’s somewhat scary. I mean, isn’t it
disgusting how basically everyone has a cell phone these days, yet
they rarely use them to talk and instead text message? Where is our
society going? My friend will come over all the time to hang out with
me and my other friends, but he’ll stay silent pretty much the
whole night. We’ll get home at one or two in the morning and I’ll
immediately get a trillion instant messages from him answering all
the questions we had asked him over the seven or eight hours he had
been over, the ones he refused to respond to while in our presence.
Doesn’t this seem a bit awkward? If not, then you’ve just got
problems, because this is definitely a serious issue. Messaging
through your fingertips is fine, but remember that you do have a
voice, so try and use it more often; otherwise, we’ll become a mute
society only capable of fingertip transmissions… and that would be
simply pathetic.
If you have any questions or comments for G.K., email him at GK@LostYouthNation.com, and be sure to check back here next Friday for
another random article from his unpredictable mind.
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