Communication

WILL ROGERS once said that the invention of air conditioning was a damned shame, because it allowed the united states senate and house of representatives to meet in session year round. He may've had a point there.

It could be argued with equal semi-seriousness that the invention of television began the process by which the american people lost the ability to communicate with each other, face to face. We turn on the TV,  turn off the rest of the world, and enter a state of hypnotic seduction.

Soon it becomes easier and easier to turn everything else on and off, including people trying to talk to us. We are left with a crisis of listening, or lack thereof.

It is a known trend in modern life that people send and receive text messages, but never use their cell phone for its original intended purpose; to speak to someone vocally. Children and teenagers, for the most part, sleep with their cell phones; never miss that all important midnight text message.

Everytime I read a letter written in the nineteenth century i am amazed at how much better people wrote letters then than now.  (of course, people seldom write letter now). Even children and people with hardly any formal education wrote better than most people do now. The contrast is striking; and it does not reflect well on our grammar butchering selves.

Face to face conversations simply don't work out very well anymore.Most of us spend our time in conversation planning our next comment, or meal, or TV show, or text,, instead of actually listening to the person talking to us.

Chances are you will either be interrupted, or talked over, at some point. And chances are you will interrupt or talk over your conversation partner. Behavior like this used to be considered highly rude and unacceptable. Now, its considered normal.

An interesting experiment would be pick out one conversation per day, speak face to face, no text messaging, and refuse to allow yourself to ignore, interrupt, or talk over the other person. It might be hard and painful, but we must have faith that we can still do it.