The Lost Art of Communication

There is a scene in the movie "He's Just Not That Into You" where Drew Barrymore is lamenting about how hard it is for her to get in touch with a certain guy.  In a nutshell, it goes something like this:


"I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies."


It's almost scary as to how true this sentiment actually is.  We live in a world where Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and instant message chatting reign supreme.  These days if I need to get in touch with someone I don't reach for the phone, I simply open up a new email message.  Most of us only carry around cell phones so we can text, and while you may not want to reconnect with some of your old high school friends, you can scope out all their drunk partying pictures by looking at their Facebook profile. 


I'm not in any way trying to say that these are useless mediums.  I'm on Facebook just as much as the next person, but I think the intensity to which some people use these sites raises some interesting ideas about how we communicate with others.  For a long time, the telephone was the lifeline of every teenage boy and girl on the planet.  Hour long phone conversations, anxiously waiting by the phone for some very important person to call you back (I guess maybe this still happens), and even though it's entirely juvenille, crank calls provided my friends and me some priceless entertainment during my adolescent years.  Of course this was before that annoying little gadget known as Caller ID.  Ahhhh....those were the days.


I'm going to presume that now instead of gabbing on the phone all night, most teenagers and others settle for hours of chatting with friends online.  Let's face it, cell phone minutes are worth their weight in gold and no one has a landline anymore.  Here's what I'm wondering: have all these fantastic online and satellite devices really brought us closer together?  Or were we better off during the days of personal phone calls, handwritten letters (I personally love getting these), and face-to-face meetings?  Unfortunately I think it's a double edged sword.  As opposed that some people may be to the Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn culture, there is no denying that these sites are serving as very useful ways for people to stay in touch and make not just social, but professional connections (although I strongly believe that MySpace is nothing but a pick-up scene, and I wouldn't be surprised if it fizzled out in the next few years). 


On the other side of the argument, should we really be relying on a computer to keep us connected to the people we deem important in our lives?  I'm not talking about your third cousin twice removed's ex-boyfriend, I'm talking about your siblings, close friends, maybe even parents and grandparents.  Sure, it's convenient, and I email my family members and friends on a weekly basis.  But couldn't I just as easily pick up the phone and share voice-to-voice contact?  Couldn't I make the effort to take 20 minutes out of my day and call my best friend in Walla Walla and simply see how she's doing?  Sure, I probably could, but then there's the convenience factor of email and the idea of saving time.....you see where I'm going with this. 


This is probably a discussion that could go round and round, pros and cons, blah, blah, blah.  But basically I think that we (probably not all of us, but most of us) have traded the personal touch for convenience.  We are a culture that is literally obsessed with making connections and being linked to hundreds of people in some way or another.  And finally we have the ability to flaunt those connections and make them work for us, not to mention make hundreds of more connections by friending the friends of friends and so forth (that was sure an interesting sentence). 


Communication is one of those things that is constantly changing and will likely keep changing in the years to come.  We have come a long way since the days of smoke signals and hieroglyphics, but these days it almost seems like some people need a crash course in learning how to communicate outside the confines of a computer screen.  Sometimes it's almost as if we are moving backwards, and doesn't that in a way speak louder than all the progression we've seen?