Among a few articles that grabbed me over the course of the weekend was a piece by Megan Gressor talked about mobile phones being the substitute for meaningful communication. In her articles not only did she mentioned people being fired via SMS, people asking others out, or dumping them, but also how she received news that a friend “Un428lY took [their life] 2Day”. Eek.
Communication in this day and age appears to have been reduced to almost short strings of characters. Will we see “The Collected SMS and E-mail’s of (insert famous writer here)?
In a sense I get it. The phone is liberating – it increased the distance between us, and rejection. The phone is changing in the manner of our interactions, the mobile also allows us to be late - we say: “Will B L8, CU Soon”.
To quote from the article: “So we retreat behind our electronic barricades, tuned in, but turned off and unable to react”.
This is modern emotion - filtered through the screen, passed on strings of alpha numeric symbols.
I turned the page; and I found another poignant piece, detailing how, even in spite of the prosperity we are supposed to be feeling we live in a climate of fear. McDonald quotes a study which details how children in the 90s report higher levels of anxiety than child psychiatric patients did in the 1950s.
Perhaps this is because the world feels more dangerous, perhaps because we feel more isolated, insignificant, or impotent to cause change. McDonald talks about how though technology promised to make us more connected, instead, we email and SMS - not talk; we (I) chat on the internet; people can watch “reality” TV to view how people relate. Interestingly today we have more one-person households than ever before.
Community has been replaced, and we live in a disengaging, individualistic society. Richard Eckersly was quoted in the article as saying that materialism appears to create less well being, not more; our culture asks that we measure ourselves against criteria which we say is the root of the issue – materialism.
Are these challenges peculiar to our age, or is this anxiety simply normal? Two very interesting articles appearing to reveal a few truths about the 21st Century
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