This is a note I jotted after talking to some students after class. I guess their phone batteries were dead! 😛 🙂 *I kid, but this is serious*
I am as fond as anyone of a chat window.
I believe certain things call for face-to-face, or at least voice-to-voice communication, but I tend to consider online chatting a way to connect with a person. So for me to make the criticism I’m about to make might seem hypocritical, but so be it. I am a man of enigma.
I started to notice something strange about how people interact about five years ago. At the time I wrote it off as personal paranoia; I was in a new place, around all new people. Perhaps I was being hypercritical. But the next year, and with louder (muted) voices in each semester to follow, my students brought the idea into my classroom. Last semester, again in a new (old) place I actually heard my students articulate it: text based chatting and text messaging is fragmenting how they communicate.
I understand the draw of these technologies better than most, I would wager, as I am a person who enjoys conversing in a way that is at least partly asynchronous so that I have time to complete my thoughts (I find I am less often misunderstood that way), and I don’t like to interrupt people (actually, as a cultural reality, I’m not supposed to interrupt people, but most people don’t understand that). But I’ve resisted becoming too obsessed, particularly with a phone.
Students tell me that their phones make it hard for them to talk to people, because it’s so much easier to text. Yeah— I can see that. It’s difficult sometimes to talk to people. It takes heart, and sometimes a seemingly disproportionate amount of courage, but the payoff is that you have a chance to converse. It’s worth it.
I have found lately that people won’t ask me questions verbally. They’ll email me later, often in short bursts, like a text message session, or like tweets. The questions are always things I could quite easily have explained in a few seconds of speaking. I answer them, of course, without any sense of anger or regret. They’re often good questions.
But I see something that scares me more. It used to be that before courses, students would sit and talk to each other. Increasingly, those students sit and stare at the screens of their phones, or at their laptops, silently waiting for class to begin. And while I don’t guess that’s a terrible thing, it seems sad to me.
What disturbs me more is that I see people, mid-conversation, pulling out devices to check for messages. I don’t think they realize how damaging, and how much of a disruption that is, to the other person. It’s fantastic to talk to people who are far, far away, but it’s not entirely prudent to do that at the expense of the person who is actually present with you.
I worry that over time, we will bond less, as people share more and more (so they think) with more and more people, but they end up really sharing less and giving and getting back less. I worry that we’ll lose track of the thing that is perhaps most valuable, not just intellectually but in terms of feeding the heart and soul. I fear we’ll lose conversation.
And if we cannot open up without a cursor, or we share our feelings most frequently hoping for a like or a retweet, it could be that we really are becoming less and less human and more and more a part of the machine, like clumsy cyborgs forever searching for something we lost just beyond the screen, something that’s still there if we could just redirect our vision for a second, just stop and think.