When Too Much Communication is Never Enough

Hello there,

This isn't so much a travel blog, as a rant. After a particularly harrowing battle with our computer - today, trying to make an online booking for a flight between Manila and Davao in the Philippines. I was noticing how attached we have all become and how we expect, nay demand that the technology works right now. At that time there may have been 20,000 Filipinos with the same idea (there are about 80 million people in the Republic of the Philippines, so perhaps it's not all that surprising that the internet gets a bit crowded from time to time).

It made me realize how we get so invested in technology providing the answer, how easy it is to use and how certain we are that it will be right. As a teacher I've lost count of the number of parents who assure me that their child's overindulgence in computer games is a positive thing (he only enjoys the educational ones... uhuh).

In the end we caught a bus, went to the airline office and handed cash across the counter - worked like a dream.

Paull

When Too Much Communication is Never Enough

New forms of instant communication have sidelined snail mail (the old-fashioned letter), the picture postcard, the utilities bill (designed to be hidden behind a fridge magnet) and even the wage packet, which arrived just in time to cover the final reminder notice - all gone. Today, the circulation of daily newspapers worldwide has more connection with advertising, salacious rumours, page 3 girls and wrapping rubbish than selling news.

Virtual communication - mobile phones, texting, email, facebook and twitter are elements of a rising tide of instant communication, threatening to render hard-copy redundant. Even the sacred Christmas card, which battles-on valiantly will soon face annihilation from the dreaded annual all-purpose friends and relatives Xmas email (Hi Everyone, it’s Christmas already…where did the year go?...).

My question is – given the vast and growing plethora of communication modes we enjoy - are we better communicators? Naturally, there are still those who hold to the old ways. Elderly ladies who wait patiently for their grand-daughter or niece to respond with a thank you note for the 16^th unremarked birthday card with attendant gift voucher (“So difficult to choose something they’ll like these days.”).

There is another form of communication one might call intra-personal – talking to oneself - a phenomenon observed in a ‘gamers’ egging (usually) himself on to victory and higher levels of challenges and achievement. However, there have been some undesirable side effects.

Whilst meeting a young person recently, I encountered a severe case of what social commentators have recently dubbed, STSA.

STSA or Security Toy Separation Anxiety occurs when the mobile phone, ipod, ipad, gameboy, or playstation of choice becomes virtually fused to the subject’s hand demanding their complete attention 24/7. In this case the child, having been asked three times to greet the visitors by actually looking at their faces, managed a three second glance combined with a mono-syllabic grunt. This was greeted with a gushy display of gratitude by the parent. I must have missed something, as the warm fuzzy glow had to be shared four ways.

My own theory is that STSA is an unfortunate side effect of the unregulated explosion of electronic games and entertainment in contemporary society. In the 1980’s Tamagotchi or as they were commonly known, pet rocks, took an unsuspecting world by storm (I mean who could have imagined that a battery operated lump of plastic which had to be played with frequently, to prevent it dying, would take off as a toy sensation? Sound familiar?). Were toy manufacturers engaging in a cynical exercise to train-up a generation of electronic toy junkies?

One wonders how children played before they collapsed on the couch with a playstation, or how they coped reading books made of paper, writing with wood-encased graphite, or a ball-tipped ink-reservoir? How was anyone able to maintain contact by telephone when it remained attached to a wall socket? Could music have possibly been appreciated before it could be attached to one’s head by auditory implants and amplified ‘til your ears bled? How did anyone survive?

The secret to survival, before the era of personal communication technology, has several strands. Firstly, it seems that others didn’t require minute by minute updates about our whereabouts (“Hi, it’s me. I just got on the train…”). Perhaps we weren’t as important as people today. Secondly, adventure was something you did, rather than saw on a screen (the farmer actually fired the shotgun just before we cleared that fence). Thirdly, we organised ourselves so that we caught a train or met up with another person, without reliance upon a satellite-based mobile telephone link-up or having to google the train timetable from the platform.

Writing was something you could keep tied up with a piece of ribbon. I still have some shaky notes penned by my grandfather as his company counted down to zero hour – the moment when soldiers step over the parapet of their trenches before jogging behind the artillery barrage into no-man’s land toward the enemy machine-guns. A book was something you could curl up with under a tree for a couple of hours without having to worry that the batteries might go flat. I guess that’s another major concern for me – batteries.

With all these electronic devices, each requiring a mobile power source – some humans have an unprecedented appetite for batteries. And batteries, even rechargeable ones, mean beaucoup pollution – the sort that sets your teeth on edge just hearing about the chemicals released via their manufacture and disposal. In fact batteries are symbolic of our relationship with electronic consumer toys:

They give a lot of pleasure at first, before they lose their kick and are finally discarded as toxic waste. And now, a comforting thought - as of 2010, over 76 million Tamagotchis had been sold world-wide (source - Wikipedia).

Goodnight!