Connected!

Is it not amazing that what we did not have a few years ago has suddenly become quite pervasive and we find that we can not imagine how we were able to do without them.  A couple of them come straight to mind email, cell phones, SMS messaging (texting),  BBM (for the Apple users out there WhatsApp) and FaceBook.  And these have changed the way we interact with the world in ways we cannot imagine.

Remember the days when the only mail you received came in an envelope and was usually delivered twice a week to your doorstep by the Mailman? While this type of mail is still available, it has been largely replaced by that electronic companion that most of us today live by, email.  Never before has mankind written so much to each other as we do today.  I have seen emails that have been written by aspiring novelists that explain everything in excruciating detail, and others that say so little that hours are spent trying to decipher what the person is saying and that results in a deluge of emails trying to uncover the meaning behind it all.  Full conversations are held over email, conversations that last for days or even months in an attempt at extracting meaning from the deluge of words, something that oddly enough could have been sorted out in five minutes in a telephone conversation.  

Remember the days when the only way that people could contact you was if you had a telephone, which was connected via a cable to the telephone exchange and that only became pervasive in the eighties, or if you paid you a visit to that person, which could be a pleasant or unpleasant experience, or bumped into them at a shopping centre or mall.  Enter the cell phone.  Before cell phones not everybody had a phone and it was considered a luxury, today it is considered an oddity if you do not have a cell phone. We have now become reachable twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days of the year. And yes, more often than not, we will answer that call.  Our attitude towards these devices have also changed and what was considered rude before, taking a call during a meeting or while having a chat, has become the norm.  So we have become more contactable to such an extent that we cannot deny the insistent ring of the damn device.

And then, just when we thought we had reached the pinnacle, we got SMS which was followed by BBM and not to mention WhatsApp and MIXIT.  So now not only were we reachable by voice, but also by various forms of text messaging and here is the thing, our behavior has changed as well and now more often than not we find ourselves immersed in one or more forms of communication at any one point in time.  If it is not a phone call it is a text message or email.

If that was not enough, along came Facebook and now we have the possibility of reaching out to hundreds if not thousands of our "friends" on Facebook.  Now not only could we chat to people, we could tell them what is on our minds and also where we are at any point in time. And all this in the time it takes to say Jack Robinson!

We are rapidly reaching a point where we shall be at the pinnacle of being in contact with each other and the world and we have every means of communicating, and surprisingly quite often, miscommunicating with each other and the world.  You see while we have become so connected with the world we do so at a distance and thus are utterly and totally disconnected from it.  Communication or I should say human communication is not only about the message but also about the messenger.  Those signals, more aptly known as body language, that contribute emotion and meaning to whats being said play a large part in the interpretation of the message.  So in our attempt at being connected, we are effectively delivering the message and in the process "killing the messenger", figuratively I might add.

To sum it all up, in our attempt to become connected, we have in fact disconnected with those we are connected to i.e. we have become "connectedly disconnected".....now give me a sec while I respond to the text message I just received ;-)