So here's the thing. We start out with letters, finely crafted communication. Thoughtful, expressive, flowing freely, in your own hand writing, personal. Then we had typewriters, not quite the same when it's not handwritten but well.....okay. The spelling got a little worse, the prose a little sloppier, but we still communicated in sentences, formed paragraphs, transitioned together to form something fairly cohesive. Then came email, and spell check, and quick messages 'shot' off to one another. Quick exchanges, intimacies without the subtleties, without formalities, convenient and easy to stay connected to both your inner and outer circles.
Now we've moved on to sites like myspace and facebook. We don't generally exchange messages. We blog, we check little boxes to indicate what our mood is at that particular moment. We even post little smilies to represent that mood whether we feel morose, irritated, ecstatic. Or we update our status with a few sentences about what we are thinking, observing, feeling. The most recent is Twitter.....updates in 140 characters or less. "Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload." All this so we can stay "hyper-connected". And yet I wonder about how meaningful all that hyper-connectivity is.
1 comment:
I use to love writting letters! I can't spell worth a darn, so they made the reader think about what I was saying. Or trying to.LOL
I could type a bit, but while in the Navy, didn't have one. My handwriting had gotten so bad, that if I do write a note now, I have to print.
The internet has made a big difference to me. I still love to keep in touch(you might have noticed that) and it makes the process much quicker and eaiser. Spell check saves me many times.LOL
I have made many, many friends that I never would have in this lifetime, if we didn't have the internet. And you save on stamps!
Steve
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