Nihar Sonalkar
WRT 302
Davidson
February 6, 2014
Communication Loses Communication
The ability to communicate amongst each other has been ingrained in the social culture of sentient beings. However, as human beings, we communicate in an abundance of ways as compared to other animals. Through voicing our ideas and thoughts, and writing them so as to communicate with the future. From writing in symbolic terms on leaf and rock, to issuing millions of copies of writing every day, human beings have made great strides in the art of communication, and with one great leap forward, comes another. Just twenty-five years after the invention of the world wide web, we are living in a day and age where communication is freedom, where everyone can just as easily get information as they can make coffee, and this ease of access to information and people is just breathtaking.
My journey into this new media, this new culture, begins when the internet is still young, when Internet Explorer is the greatest invention ever, and when Orkut is still the hype of a culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, the internet had become a hub for communication, a point of origin for many adventurous explorers out in the online world. I was simply one of them, a student, a free spirit out to explore what the world had to offer. I remember logging in to Orkut and, searching for the first time, the names of my friends from school, and realizing just how brilliant it all is. I think Orkut lost its charm when they started introducing advertisements into your private conversation, muddying up the process of immersing yourself into this online form, albeit it still has a substantial user base, the magic of being new and different is now lost. This hype for Orkut only lasted for a year amongst my friends, and before I knew it, everyone had already migrated to the newest face for the social network, facebook.
I decided to give it a try, wondering how exactly this was any different from what we had had in the past. It was a new entity in and of itself, a simpler, more chic, adaptation of what Orkut had been. I think this freshness is what drew me in the most, and the best part about it was that it had no advertisements to distract me from going about my business. This new social network was so brilliantly simple, that it grasped at you, and before you knew it, you had transported your entire life online.
This new life on facebook had its advantages, the first mainly being the ease of communication, and second, how easy it was to share ideas, make friends, and come out of a shell that surrounded you in the outside world. However, in a few years of being on facebook, I started noticing that my friends and I never actually met in person other than in school. That connection that formed in the presence of another had disappeared, when a group of friends met at a cafe, or out to play their favorite sport had suddenly lost its value; sure we’d still meet over the weekends to hang out, but that brief connection felt like an empty shell of what it used to be. We were slowly giving up each other’s company for efficient communication, and that was frightening.
I started reducing my usage of facebook, the wonderful and brilliant place to get in touch with friends and family, until I stopped altogether, to spend more time with my friends and family. We may say that facebook is like a double-edged sword, where, in gaining an ease of communication and obtaining information, we lose the one thing that we have tried so hard to improve, communication. I mean sure, we could still use other modes of communication that allow people to hear and see each other such as Skype, or Oovoo. But is it really the same? We live in a society of speed, where time is the most precious resource, and if an action isn’t taken within a certain time frame, it feels as though we’re sitting around doing nothing. I speak through experience, as a victim to the fleeting nature of time.
It seems that innovation of new and improved ways of communication will always have an upside and a downside, depending on how you perceive it. If someone were to ask me what my preference between online communication and meeting in person is, my reply would most probably be: As long as I cherish the moments, and respect the time, it doesn’t matter which mode of communication I use.