A good friend of mine visited me the other day. This is how it went: I sat at the back of the room. He sat near the front and in front of my computer. We weren't very far apart at all, but it was very hard for me to see him.
All I could do was hear. I heard the arrhythmic clicks of a lifeless keyboard and the muted clicks of a mouse. With each key stroke, the clicking grew to pounding. My blood pressure grew with the pounding.
And then, as if in a fit of madness, I yanked the power strip from its source.
Our way of life, our luxuries and our technological capacity has stripped us of real relationships. Basic human interaction has been sold-out, outsourced to far away places --like cyberspace.
Real human relationships depend on human interaction. But Americans seem to have forgotten that.
It is scary to me that friends today actually can be in the same room and not even have a real conversation. In my case, the computer stole the show, so our visit was half spent with me looking at the back of his head while he browsed music videos and his bank statements. The other half of the visit I spent trying to prove this point: Technology, despite its good, has been detrimental to the substance of human relationships and values. And as a result, the American people are suffering in the places where it counts most.
One scholar seems to have foreshadowed this disintegration of human relationships.
Society never advances. It recedes on one side as fast as it gains on the other, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. It undergoes continual changes; it's barbarous, it's civilized, it's Christianized, it's rich, it's scientific; but this change isn't better. For everything given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
We don't sit down at the dinner table for dinner anymore; we let television parent our youth; we expect material wealth to equal stability and happiness.
Yet we are confused when our children from the wealthiest families overdose on heroin while in college or take their own lives by jumping from library balconies.
We want everything fast and in an instant. We want to drive-thru. Bigger always is better.
Then we wonder why our children are obese
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet, Emerson wrote.
We can e-mail, e-shop, e-date and share Cliffs notes.
Then we wonder why our young men and women don't know the value in the written word, the dollar, courting or hard work.
We teleconference and shake hands via satellite.
Then we wonder why there is such corruption in our businesses and so little integrity.
A recent study released in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine links obesity to time spent driving. Now, the media are making a big deal to emphasize the obvious benefits of walking whenever possible.
But what if the real truth in the study is that when people walk, they are forced to talk?
When two people are walking, there is no radio or car television to intercept the interaction.
The couple will likely be frustrated to be walking in the first place. They will watch the cars effortlessly speed by or the cars that could get them to their destination in a fraction of the time that their feet will carry them.
They will have no choice but to talk to each other. And that is good.
Because when a nation's people stop talking to one another, that nation has lost its vision.
-Meghan Crosby is a senior journalism major. Send her an e-mail at meghan.crosby@ohiou.edu.
17 Archives
Meghan Crosby
