Staying Connected Can Tear You Apart

A ping on my phone alerted me that I had a new text message. It was a reminder of an upcoming dental appointment.

Later, I received an email message reminding me of the same thing, followed by an automated phone call in case I missed the first two.

While this is overkill, it’s all part of the way humans communicate today. We do it because we can. It’s just that the evolution of communication is getting ahead of our ability to keep up. We don’t communicate with flags or smoke signals anymore. Who needs to send Lassie for help when you can just send an SOS on your smart watch, complete with your location?

It’s fun to think back about the means of communication available during my youth in the 1960s and 1970s. You could certainly talk directly to someone. The phone provided verbal communication only and was tethered to something. We didn’t care about fancier phones. We just wanted more phones – upstairs, in the basement, maybe even the bathrooms. Voice mail was still just a dream.

We sent actual handwritten letters and postcards (in cursive!) through the mail. You could basically talk to someone in person or on the phone. Or you could mail a letter or send a hand-delivered telegram.

Just the Fax Ma’am

The only way to transmit a document back then was with a fax machine which scanned the document and sent it over a phone line to be deciphered and printed on the receiving end (a facsimile). Businesses used them the most because they were very expensive. By the time they were built into printers for home use, their need was already receding into the sunset.

We can now store an endless amount of information and can make it available to almost anyone anywhere. No one could do that 25 years ago. We have so many ways to communicate today that we often need to decide which method to use.

Equally, others can communicate with us, and those “others” can be non-humans. We just bought a new washer/dryer set that we can run from an app from anywhere. You still have to sort your clothes and load it, unfortunately. My garage doors can be controlled from anywhere. My cars talk to me and have their own security cameras. My refrigerator sends me a note if its door was left open.

If you just want to talk to someone, a phone will do nicely. But today you have the capability to see the person you’re talking to on your smartphone. Texting seems to be even more common than calling now because you can send text messages quickly or you can carefully craft your message before sending it.

Text and email messages can take longer since you need to write them and you don’t get the immediate feedback that talking provides but you can stay on topic when you write them. You also have a record of the entire discussion.

Photo Bombs from the Past

Want to share your photos with friends, family or anyone? Back in the day, you had physical photo albums, crammed full of your blurry prints from your “Open Me First” Kodak Instamatic camera. You also may have had slide carousels to show captive audiences. I have scanned and uploaded old photos, slides and digital photos to a website to share with others.

Think of the one-way means of communication we grew up with like radio, TV, books, magazines and newspapers – they’re almost all available on your phone now. Their simple access makes it easy for them to gobble up your interpersonal time and turn you into a recluse. Remember Covid?

We’re in this perfect storm of easy, mostly-free access to untold amounts of online information and many ways to access it. But there are only 24 hours in the day and we all need time for rest and nourishment.

But just because information is available doesn’t mean you need to be exposed to all of it. The hard part is filtering it so you focus only on the information that is relevant to you. However, by being selective, are we limiting ourselves and picking sides? This hasn’t worked well with politics.

Competing with your actual face time are all the social media apps that are mostly faceless by design as well as the apps for shopping, weather, stocks, education to name a few.

There’s so much to be said about the ways we communicate that books are written about it which, of course, just add to the information overload.

Well, I have to go. My washer just sent me a notification that it’s done.