Step away from your phone
Face to Face conversation is changing as technology improves!!
Young people today, along with their Snapchat and their selfies and their sexting, apparently engage in a practice known as “phubbing”. According to Sherry Turkle, the American sociologist of digital life, this involves maintaining eye contact with one person while text-messaging another. Are kids incapable of concentrating face to face with another person?
If face-to-face conversation is dying , then it has something to do with our fear of feeling vulnerable. Nobody ever enjoyed feeling sad, or awkward, or stressed, or being put on the spot. But now we have a place to run and hide when those emotions arise: we can check out of the here and now, into digital space. We can edit our thoughts before we express them; we can hide our faces, and even our names; we can interact with others while holding them comfortably at bay.
Leaving yourself exposed to the risk of awkward or upsetting conversations is bad, but picking up the bill, it seems, is even worse. In any case, those potentially uncomfortable conversations are what make life meaningful. Turkle quotes the comic Louis CK, in a routine on why he won’t let his daughters own smartphones, delivering, in the guise of comedy, a chilling warning: “Because we don’t want that first feeling of sad, we push it away with our phones. So you never feel completely happy or completely sad. You just feel kind of satisfied with your products. And then… you die."
The world of social media gets criticised for ruining our traditional English language and altering it into absolute gibberish. It is also argued it is ruining our emotional connection to people as now all this is said and done online.
The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield spent five months in 2012 and 2013 twirling around the Earth in command of the International Space Station. Hadfield guesses he made several thousand orbits of the planet during that time, and though he was never exactly bored, he certainly found some novel hobbies. The American artist Randall Munroe knows something, too, about capturing an audience in the age of the fast and fickle online share; “romance, sarcasm, math and language." He is a longstanding admirer of Hadfield, and asked Weekend to get in touch with the astronaut, which is where this link leads to, discussing the hobbies they enjoy more than anything. They talk about a range of things, starting at pop culture...progressing all the way to debating about the recent attacks in Syria and Islamic states.
