In this contemporary, increasingly digitalized world, what sets us apart is often what makes us human: our flaws, our determination, our emotions. Yet on a larger, more encompassing plane—our communication.
These are likely our greatest contributions to one another and to our surroundings, and will be more and more important to us as hostilities and dangers in our world increase.
Furthermore, most problems that we have tend to be solved or eased up a bit by communication; the aforementioned flaws, determination and emotions can only be expressed and shared by communicating—verbally and otherwise.
North Korea’s communications with South Korea, though very tense, became an international sensation not only because it was surprising and unprecedented during Kim Jong-Un’s rule, but because it provided hope and assurance for the future and for avoiding nuclear war.
Thus, as we all know, is the power of communication—for which we have forsaken much of true communication itself. With our phones, our tablets and a whole appetizer menu’s worth of social media sites, we begin to feel as if we have mastered communication. We have entrusted our interpersonal communications that were once granted to pens, ink, vocal cords and faces to small devices not quite as loud as our voices.
The more we think we have mastered communication, the more we must hold on to it. In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Stop Googling, Let’s Talk,” Sherry Turkle claims that “even a silent phone disconnects us.”
With our phones, we become more detached from what we say and more attached to the device. Without accompanying facial expressions or rhetorical contexts to explain them, texts, though convenient, become confusing, but addicting to us. Teenagers fight over misunderstandings over texts, adults lose friendships and point fingers at one another.
Children, amazed by the instant responses and concise lingo, subconsciously prepare themselves to follow the numbing digital track carved out by the previous generation.
We become worse and worse listeners, with shorter and shorter attention spans and decreasing tolerance for the slow lull of the spoken word, even though human voices are psychologically supposed to be the most soothing sounds to us. We fail to realize that slower communication is at least more efficient than completely missing the point of what is being said.
The increased usage of emojis by young people (and old people keeping up with the times) was likely a subconscious attempt to make up for the lack of expression associated with our platonic “LOL”s and “OMG”s.
Inasmuch as we think we are taking our day-to-day facial expressions to the digital world, we also take emojis into our DNA-programmed lives. A classmate of mine recently explained to me that oftentimes when she seems angry, she is really only trying to express anger to receive the expected response from others.
When I asked her if that was on purpose, and if that impacted how she felt, her response was. “I don’t even know that I’m doing it. I would feel so mad that later I would even wonder why I got mad in the first place.”
In short, technology is indeed a large help to our global society, and it does reduce distance between people who would otherwise not be able to communicate. However, it also distances us from those we hold dearest. It is not that we must let go of the benefits of technology and the empowerment it has given us, but that we must simultaneously learn to adapt and control ourselves while we explore the digital world—in real time.
— Connie Xie
Xie is a student High School South.
