Have
we lost our ability to communicate?
Okay I want
everyone to think about the last time they had a heart to heart conversation.
But the conversation had to happen in person, not over text messages, not over
social media, in person. We’ve lost our basic communication skills as a
society, nothing has meaning anymore, nothing is sincere. Talk to you later has
turned into “TTYL”, I love you to “ILY”, see you later to “C u later”. And now,
this has affected our ability to grow up, put down the phone, get a job, and
use proper communication skills. We’ve lost the ability to transition to formal
grammar and communication at the right times.
We’re
growing up in a time when elementary school children rather play on their iPads
rather than go outside and play with their friends, us high-schoolers rather
facetime or text rather than go out, we stay in our room all night texting
someone who’s just in the room next to ours. We don’t even want to talk to our
parents face to face, I even find myself texting my mom while we are both in
the same house, “how was your day?”, “what’s for dinner?”, “can you bring my
backpack into my room?”. We are educating this society, this generation, in
such a way that we lack to ability to work together, and communicate
effectively. In Midnight;s Children, Saleem had his own way of losing his
social skills, instead of losing them because of technology; he lost them
because of the midnight’s children. Once
he discovers these “voices inside his head”, and discovers he can talk to the
children all born at midnight when India gained its independence, he becomes an
introvert. We lose our social skills, affecting us as we leave college, we
leave college book smart, ready to tackle on a job, but here we are for our job
interview and we can’t even get halfway through it because we can’t even seem
to answer a couple questions about ourselves.
Cells
communicate by sending and receiving signals, much like how we communicate by
talking to another person, we “send” or say what we need to say and the other
person “receives” our message and responds. In cells the way to trigger a
response is by the signals transmitting across the cell membrane, our words
that we say to another person affect them, letting our words soak into their
brain “across the membrane” in order to “trigger” a response. Yes, I did just
bring biology into this.
So maybe we
should put down the phones and discover and enjoy life not through a screen.
