Beep Beep Beep, Ring Ring, Pop

I am a tech junkie.  I geek out when it comes to cell phones, play videogames, am obsessed with the latest and greatest and know the difference between LCD, AOLED, plasma, and LED.  I spend time blogging on my laptop, own an android smartphone, and use Google for just about everything under the sun.  I get jokes about Skynet and Hal, and frequent Geekologie and XKCD.  Yet I hate technology more than anything.  It has shackled me more than any job, girlfriend, or government ever could.  Technology has completely taken away my freedom, and I want it back.

The easiest way to point this out is by analyzing communication.  I am reachable by email, cellphone, text, instant message, and Facebook at any point during the day.  I am almost never without a device that can receive and reply instantaneously to any of those.  I can pump out a full text message in less than 30 seconds, and receive email and Facebook notifications on my phone.  I am, by all definitions, connected.  If I had to remove myself from my community I, and those who I network with, would go crazy within hours.  How often are you upset if you contact someone and they don’t reply to you in half an hour?  I know I am often a culprit of becoming disgruntled even after 5 minutes- patience is something I undoubtedly lack.

The telephone is now over a hundred years old.  Before then communication was strictly by word of mouth or snail mail.  People used to only write stuff down when it was too difficult to reach someone else to tell them by word of mouth.  Now, we write more than we actually talk.  We hold arguments over email and text messaging, even when the person we’re arguing with is less than a block or a day away.  Communication has lost all personal touches over time.

I find it interesting how formal invitations are usually done through snail mail.  We used to only hand write these, but now, due to the ever increasing size of our social networks, events are bigger and we usually order messages for mail.  I think this tradition is a mistake, or at lease has lost its meaning with time.  It is a tradition that was meant to garner respect.  When the custom first started it was expensive to write a letter and mail it, which made the event classy.  It was also a very personal message, since you know the letter was hand written for you.  Now, it’s awkward, cheap, and slow.  When you get an invitation in the mail many people look at how nice the card is before even looking at the event. 

We can do better.   We owe it to ourselves and our friends.  If you care so much about a person shouldn’t he or she be worth time to talk to face to face?  Are you really so pressed for time that a text message where you abbreviate half the words is the best that you can do?    I don’t want to live in a society where I never see my friends.   I want the instant communication- I crave it more just as much as anyone else, but I would trade thirty minutes of face time to a thousand text messages any day.