Technological Voyeurism: The Ills of Anonymity and Cheap Communication
Kind sir or madam, please hear my cry. I know. You don't see the big deal. I know. You just can't stop multitasking. I know. Believe me, I know that you mean well. The flashing light pulsing from your ear coupled with a thunderous tone of voice--as if no one else is around, although clearly many of us are--indicates your strange, yet increasingly common comfort with making private conversations public. I know. You could care less about who overhears your boisterous banter, but you should. It isn't becoming. Really.
Far too often nowadays I am reminded of how we blindly allow technology to use us (put another way, we immaturely use it) rather than us responsibly managing these advances. I see it while in line at the grocery store, being forced to listen to the fella in front of me conversing loudly on his cell phone with some woman about their upcoming rendezvous to the Poconos Mountains. I don't know who she is to him (spouse, girlfriend, mistress, "friend with benefits," or escort), but while he is salivating over what will be, I am wondering why I must endure all of this to simply buy a few cartons of my favorite Minute Maid Limonada/Limeade. I see it on the highway as my fellow automobile operators zoom past me with fast-food in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and their knees controlling the steering wheel.
I see it on social media services like Facebook where old high school classmates, long lost relatives, and others randomly spring forth from cyberspace like feeds with the infamous "Friend Request." However, they don't actually want to communicate with you to any significant or sustained degree because we don't largely use these technological gems for better communication so much as the cheap variety. Self-actualized I may be, but I delete people from my Friend List with the quickness. I just don't get it. If we aren't actually going to communicate better or more often with this communicative tool, then why is everyone hustling to become one another's friend through these technologies? It seems, dare I say, a tad bit shallow. Call me strange if you will, for I am not the person who has 1,500 friends.
I see it on blogs where voyeurs (my wife calls them lurkers) come a dime a dozen. But, there are two groups among them. There are those who know of you and your writings exclusively in cyberworld who sometimes develop a false sense of interconnectivity, as if you and they are pals rather than purely two strangers who happen to share some similar interests; and at that, even so, only over the Internet. Although, understandably, I am more accessible than Oprah (and, of course, not famous or wealthy), reading her blog, for example, doesn't make us friends anymore than watching her television show does. The other type is those who do know you in the real world. They are relatives and friends who you never hear from other than impromptu comments about your blog posts. Yes, that is right. They know you personally, but lurk on your blog in order to foster a false sense of relationship. It is crazy, I know. This is an even stranger paradigm because these people actually have your phone number and mailing address, so they could call or write you if they had a mind to. They don't, however, but then will purport to be so well connected to you. I think not.
Over the years, as a youth pastor I would compose hand-written notes of encouragement to the students that I served. I saw them not only at church for Sunday service, Bible study, and other events, but at the local high school football game on Friday night, and then throughout the week when I might have visited with their teacher to check-in on their grades and behavior. I would take church members to lunch or maybe stop by their home to thank them for their hard work at a recent event. I would avail myself to local business owners and get to know their names as we spent time with each other. Call me crazy, but there seems to be something cathartic, something necessary in human beings being vulnerable and genuine with one another. And, this should be even more prominent in those of us who call ourselves disciples of Christ.
We are experiencing a technological revolution of sorts, which reinvents itself every few years, but if we aren't careful we will become a society of socially obtuse automatons; savvy in all things digital, deficient in all things meaningful. For example, I know people, both young and old, who can't read or write well (and perhaps don't even have a desire to). Oh, but they are proudly well-versed in text-ease. According to Ian Shapira, "Young people say they avoid calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, Facebooking or tweeting. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip of an arriving text."[1]
Sad, but true. I fear that our all-consuming fascination with immediate gratification will drag us down, not lift us higher as many would like us to believe.[2] The writing is on the wall.
Whatever happened to face-to-face interaction or long phone conversations with close friends and family? When we begin to value the so-called ease of technologically advanced communication more than the real people with whom we ought to be communicating with, something is disastrously wrong with our sense of relationship and love.
I know. I know. You are too busy for all of this interpersonal communication jazz. You don't see any inherent problems with technological anonymity, voyeurism, and cheap communication. It is simply the way things are done now, you say.
So be it.
Pardon me, though, if I don't LOL.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/07/AR2010080702848.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html