Open Communication

Happy Black Friday and belated Thanksgiving greetings to you all. Just woke up from a nap after my eight-hour shopping marathon (12am-8am). Just kidding. I hope you enjoyed some good food and company yesterday.

My conversations at the Thanksgiving dinner table yesterday have prompted me to write about our (i.e. human beings') need to share ourselves with each other. We are inherently social creatures, and the world continues to shrink thanks to the advent of technologies such as the internet and the cell phone. Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, OkCupid, text messages and many more have all made intercommunication a snap. Literally.

In a lot of ways, this is really great. I can log onto facebook and instantly see the statuses of all 951 of my friends. (Godspell opens tonight at Turtle Lane!) I can look at recent photos of the wedding or party that I missed and comment on them.  (Glad I didn't go to that one...) I can instantly see what's going on inside my friend's head even though he lives in California. (What kind of presents do you open on Thanksgiving, though??) I can meet tons of people online, learn about them, and then perhaps even meet them in person. (Cool or creepy?) I could go on and on. These are all wonderful distractions.

What worries me is that everything is designed to happen quickly, and people seem to be losing patience for anything that might be more time-consuming, such as writing a thoughtful and well-composed e-mail to a friend. Much easier to go to that person's facebook wall and write a quick remark. E-mail is literally overwhelming these days. Between my two main jobs, list serves, extracurricular groups and automated stuff I receive from Barnes and Noble, Macy's, Groupon, E-Bay, United Airlines (even though I try to unsubscribe from these services, they still send me e-mails!), I easily read between 50 and 100 emails a day, and I have to respond to and keep track of the majority. Madness! You need to write this course description. When can you meet to record the Christmas music? When are you free to rehearse? Please update me on my child's performance in your class. I can't be at choir this Sunday. Can you come to my party?

I thought getting a BlackBerry would help me keep up with it, but it turns out that I've just become addicted. I have no excuse now not to respond almost immediately. See? Just as I wrote that sentence, I just checked to see if someone had responded yet to an important email I wrote. Nope. BUT he did respond to another email that I sent around the same time. Why not to both? And of course, some people are just horrible communicators, and this trait is virtually unacceptable now in an age where all you need to do is press a few buttons and *BAM* you've communicated. Patience wears thin much more quickly than it used to.

So these technologies add unnecessary aggravation and stress to our lives in addition to making them simpler. And there are more philosophical questions here that intrigue me a great deal:

1) What do we choose to share with each other, and why? Is anything too private?
2) Does our online life affect the way we interact with people offline?
3) How does what we see and do online shape our perception of people?
4) What constitutes a "friend"?
5) How did we survive before, and could we go back?

The truth is that people are so complex that they are impossible to circumscribe in categories (likes, dislikes, favorites), yet our culture loves to categorize because doing so purportedly makes things easier to understand. Oversimplification is problematic! There's not a lot of room for change anymore. Once we say it, whatever "it" is, it's out there, and it's hard to take back. And it's too easy. Online media create the impression that people are mere snapshots of themselves. Snapshots are like statues. They aren't real. No one has it all figured out. Everything is a process. Everyone has issues they struggle with, questions without clear-cut answers, uncertainty... You might think that all of this newfangled technology should help us open up and talk, let each other know that we're not alone, but I think it just helps us hide more easily.

I still participate in all of this online hubbub. I just wonder if I'm warier than most.

What do you think?