Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

The impermanence of communication

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

Waiting for the baby to arrive. Well, he’s here, but, for now, he prefers the confines of Rachel’s womb. I’ve done a lousy job of keeping friends abreast of my spawning. Every few days I think of someone else who I just sort of didn’t mention this baby thing to during the last, oh, nine months. These online tools, from email to blogs to social networking, are primarily supposed to make such general broadcasts of life events much easier. However, you have to use the tool to get the result, and I’ve become disgustingly lax. I blame Rachel, my wonderful and social wife. I just figured that everyone who knows me also knows Rachel, and, much in the way that I can rely on her to answer the telephone whenever it horrifically invades my personal sanctuary, she would take care of this baby-announcing business.

In a way, Facebook has made communication so easy that it’s become warped and diminished. It reminds me of the terrible havoc wreaked by word processing. I’m just old enough to remember what it was like to type something. On a typewriter. You could set the margins, apply a little white-out, and maybe throw in some carbon paper. Every other aspect was extremely permanent and one-shot. When word processing came along, everything became variable. Composition is just the first step. Tweaking margins and fonts is trivial, and I think most of us have, at one point, creatively stretched a 2.5 page paper out to meet the 3-page requirement. Worse yet, the draft has become extinct. You write it out, edit as you go, and then rewrite directly on top of what you just did. There is no archive, and no duty to permanence. Using a typewriter, there is a deliberate aspect to every word, every character. When you know you can undo anything you just typed, it doesn’t seem as important to get it right the first time. The true destruction, though, is to the art of spelling.

I can’t spell. The computer takes care of everything for me, so I don’t have to worry. However, back in those typewriter days, I don’t think I could spell worth a crap anyway. So yes, science has helped me become a better human. But I’m certain that, with nothing but that trusty typewriter, I would have become a much better speller. I wouldn’t have had a choice. Either adapt, learn how to do it, or blow my savings on Liquid Paper, year after year. The word processor has destroyed any requirement on my part to have any freaking idea how to spell. I’m 41 years old now, and it just ain’t gonna happen.

Now I’m worried that Facebook (and whatever other upcoming innovation in social networking) is doing the same thing to the art of communication. We used to rely on face-to-face, letters and telephones. Then email. Now we just need to occasional status update, broadcast to all who sign up. Conversations become strings of loosely connected fragments, murmurs and shouts from the ether. Pretty soon I could simply install event-listening software on a personal device, and I won’t have to bother typing “Jim is on the way to the hospital” or “Jim just ate two bowls of chili and has been in the bathroom for the last hour, reading three chapters of the new L. Frank Baum biography.” Everything will be coded, RFID’d and tagged. My iPhone will know that I’m in the bathroom, my personal health record will have something to say about the effect of chili on my gastrointestinal fortitude, and the tag in my L. Frank Baum book (too cheap right now to buy a Kindle) will report relevant info back to the iPhone. The iPhone will shoot out the appropriate message, according to my settings, to folks with the appropriate access roles and I won’t need to bother actually telling people what I’m up to. Instead of “like” and “dislike”, I can just select from 10-15 pre-written responses that should apply to just about anything. With absolute minimal effort, we can all send each other updates and responses and automated chuckles, and the art of conversation is both simplified, streamlined and destroyed. And without the efforts of forward thinkers, it will also not be archived.

I am most critical of myself, so this is a reaction to my own dopey way of falling off the map. I don’t have to be so fatalistic about this. I mean, it’s up to each of us to stop monkeying around and actually put a little effort into our surrounding humanity.

So, um, we bought a house, too. Yes. Any other life events? You all should know that Rachel and I are married (implied by the “wife” status). Both of our cats died in early 2009 (a month or so apart). We went to Hawaii in May, attending one of my big librarian meetings, and had a wonderful time connecting with family on both Oahu and the Big Island.

Our son will be named Simon.

I raked leaves today.

I ate soup with bread while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Jim is sitting at his computer.

Jim sure likes this weather.

Jim wonders.