#personalcontact

So I’m talking with a co-worker today, lamenting at the many recent times my conversations have been cut off, ended or ignored by people choosing rather to divert their attention to electronic devices.

I’m ashamed to say that mid me pouring out my grief to her, I look over and she was replying to a text on her phone.

Frequently, I’ll go over to a close relative’s, sit on the couch, and talk to them about my week, twiddling my thumbs, while they’re shopping online.

Or I’ll go over to another friends house, and they half listen to what I’m saying as they try to find out what TV channel their show will be on.

We can’t hold two conversations. Or listen to two pieces of music...or be at two places at the same time; if your mind is in personal space, it cannot simultaneously be in cyberspace, regardless of how well you can go ‘uh huh...that’s right...yeah...oh! good point <mumble, mumble>.

Here’s a good point; one day when you’re dying, you’re going to wish you had paid attention to your friends.

I love to think about taverns in the 17th century, early colonial America, how much of a kinship there must have been in those places, knowing that everyone in the bar was ACTUALLY IN THE BAR.

When a new person walked in, everyone would notice, why? Because the atmosphere would change. Like when rich people use to have their names announced at parties when they entered.

Now you’d have to announce every new email and facebook chat message appearance on a plasma screen hung up over the chandelier.

And you know where this is heading? Internet implanted into our brains, I can gosh dam guarantee you. Instant free knowledge, instant mental contact with anything on the planet (and maybe other planets), leading to no interaction at all.

Because you can’t BE with one person, when you’re constantly, entirely surrounded by countless other people!!

And what no one will ever remember was the time before technology, when there was something very similar to instant microchip-in-brain contact that connected the whole world.

Some people on this planet still have communities, where people know each other personally, interpersonally and holistically as a community organism, all at the same time. They KNOW each other. They are raised with the same people that they live and watch grow, and their families grow, and they all grow old and die together, delighting in their children’s children.