Beyond those emoticons

It’s tough to depend on technology to build trust. Bring the “human” in you, to the table.

open page rathindra nath das

M ankind’s advancement in life by claiming the coveted top spot in the animal pyramid can be linked to how far it has stretched the fabric of science and technology. The times we live in today demand that we take the hand of technology and walk with it everywhere. It’s almost omnipresent; you can deny this but sure as hell can’t avoid.

Okay, cool, we live in the 21st century, what’s the big deal, you may say. Truly, no big deal actually. But I’m not here to just say something that is already known widely. What I really wanted to say here is for people and especially children of our generation, like you, to take an insight into it from a different angle, a different perspective.

While I was writing this in a coffee shop, I noticed something incredible. No, it’s not the price of my already cold, boring coffee. Instead, it’s the people around. I observed that most of them were not really interested in the menu at the swank eatery. Much worse, they weren’t totally interested in the people they came to hang out with either. Most of them were busy texting, status-updating, and so on. If not for the ceremonial selfies, and the parliamentary debates on who pays the bill, I would have reported them as entities living in the sixth dimension, completely unaware of our regular three-dimensional surroundings. This is a major problem.

We humans have been filtered through eons of evolution, beating all odds. But one thing that remained a constant was that we were not just animals but social animals. Highly social, and intelligent species with almost no match.

Our mutual exchange of thoughts and ideas culminate in our code for survival. But this is slowly changing, for better or for worse. We have started shifting from a joint big family to small nuclear groups. We are spending more time behind closed walls in front of an electronic screen than meeting with people. We are depending more on artificial intelligence (AI) than our very own intelligence. As when we want to know the answer to a question, it’s become a tradition to do it the Google way rather than just burning some grey matter.

The way we interact

I am not anti-AI, I am against anti-human. What I mean is, when something completely deletes the very essence of who we are and what we do, it should automatically raise an alarm. I am not going to dwell on the rise of the Terminators or Skynet. That would be another story altogether. All I want is to shed light on the fact that we are changing so much in the way we interact.

Yes, social networking is awesome, you can connect with someone who is on the other corner of the world. We’re always connected, so near, yet so far. But it doesn’t have a remedy to one thing, in building trust, yes my friend, trust. You can easily talk to one person, hear and see, etc., using this medium, but you can’t build the basics of the things in any relationship through this.

Trust is the brick and mortar to any interaction. And there’s no quick fix to this. It takes time to earn one’s trust. And for that we shouldn’t completely depend on technology. You should get out of your room, have a face-to-face and express yourself without the help of mere emoticons. Bring the “human” in you, to the table. There’s no edit button in real life, so don’t worry if you make mistakes. In fact, take pride in learning from them.

Fred Flintstone too had problems, and so did George Jetson and his family. They all had to face tough times. But they learnt to embrace them and endure them.

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