“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.” - Rollo May
Wishes arrive from everywhere. There are so many avenues to send them through. Email, text messages, messaging services, micro blogs, social media. All these are perfect opportunities to for the impersonal personal message. How many of us actually pick up the phone to wish our loved ones? Not just for new year, but for any festival or celebration? We even send condolences via text. I have been thinking a lot about this in the last few months.
I am reminded of a dear cousin who visited India (she lives in Canada) after ages. She was exasperated to see my constant need to keep checking my phone. I explained to her that since I worked from home, it was my way of keeping in touch with friends and family. She was not convinced. When I think about it, if you need to stay in touch and do have the choice, what can be better than actually meeting someone? But like Michael Robbins says, “My smoothie comes with GPS…” (We Have the Technology) In fact, that’s a familiar scene– at restaurants, parks, movie theatres and what have you. People huddled around, their faces lit up –by their gadget screens.
Technology has made many things possible – broadening information, building contacts and business and creating new friendships. In Chat Room, Paul Foster Johnson ends with these lines, “Our presence was only possible/because of advances in technology/in a dialectical relationship with their debasement:/servers in cold rooms/and a recursive void of woodblock chat sounds.” Sometimes, conversations are chats and friends are just a number on a list.
In Elegy, Daisy Fried talks about an old friendship- “Twenty years later/I get your news by Facebook update/three hundred characters or less…”
Forgive me for sounding cynical but take a look at the world around us! We are connected all the time, obsessively so, and yet we are essentially, alone.
Remember all that brouhaha over blue ticks versus non-coloured ticks and what it means for relationships? I am reminded of what Jefferson Bethke says, “We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are.”
I was struck by the truth in I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook, by Craig Santos Perez. Please read it, if you can. In Potato Soup, Daniel Nyikos, after a long discussion by computer and webcam with his mother and aunt on how to make the soup, turns off the computer and eats alone. It’s a striking image after all the virtual conversation.
In his tongue-in-cheek and delightful poem, How to Be Perfect, Ron Padgett urges readers to, among other things, “Make eye contact with a tree. Do not spend too much time with large groups of people. Take your phone off the hook at least twice a week. Do not exclaim, ‘Isn't technology wonderful!’ Read and reread great books.” The poem, that’s an eclectic wonderful list, is filled with wisdom. This year, gradually but surely, please disconnect to connect. Your gadgets aren’t going anywhere. But time, is and people, might be. Share moments, not forwards, make conversations, not chats, and think about love, not ‘likes.’
