The other day I received notification in the mail to renew my driver's license. Pretty standard stuff, but one thing that jumped out at me was a statement that issued an additional $5 fine for renewing it in person at the DMV. Now I understand that the DMV can be as crowded as Charon's boat across the Styx, and they want to try to make it more manageable, but this is touching on a much larger issue in society. Increasingly, society has become more and more dehumanized. We live in the era of online banking, online job applications, online friends (Facebook, anyone?). Gone are the days of going to the bank and interacting with a human, and telling them, "Hello, how are you? Have a wonderful day!" No longer are job applications personal and one on one. Now, your application is just another computer document, with no face or personality to associate with it. You and your application are reduced to facts and numbers by a disinterested employer. Facebook has ushered in an era where a friend is just a number and a post. Now friends chat in little boxes on a glowing screen, where a conversation over tea or a phone call could have been scheduled just as easily.
I understand why this impersonal contact is so appealing. Human interaction can get messy a large chunk of the time. Misunderstandings and prejudices can be rampant in human dealings, but I will argue that a lot of these flaws in communication are a result of this online trend. Like all things, communication requires practice. If you spend most of your day living online, how can you expect to have good communication skills? I believe that if people made an effort to talk to their fellow citizens and to connect with them, even if on the most basic level, many of the social injustices of our time will be obliterated. Even just one kind word or a smile can change a life. It's hard to change lives like that online.
No comments:
Post a Comment