The Company of Strangers

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me these days we communicate rather than talk. Go to a restaurant, look around and you will see teenagers, parents, girlfriends, hell even people on dates sitting there and staring into the glowing comfort of their phones. They have the stare of someone who looks like they are talking about something important, but actually are talking about… well let me be honest, I have no fucking clue what they are talking about. What is so goddamned important that you have to text about it while you are out with people? I mean there is a living breathing person in front of you. Talk to them! It is maddening to see such lack of contact among people. With each click of our phone screens, we become further away from caring and curious individuals and closer to blind animals running around with no clue of the world around them. We transform into these shells who rely on their phones to be connected to the outside world, when the world is right there staring them in the face. We use emoticons instead of emotions, hash tags instead of full sentences. But Lefty, it is convenient. Sometimes I don’t want to talk to someone, so I text them. What kind of goddamned sense does that make? Either you want to talk to someone or you don’t. This half-assed excuse for not physically speaking to someone drives me insane. Don’t even get me started on the idiots who text and drive. Those people are giant douche-bags waiting to wrap themselves around a phone pole or worse, take out someone with them.

Maybe I come off sounding like someone out of touch with the modern world. I guess I am in a sense. I remember in my younger days, people sitting and talking to each other face to face. A real connection being made between people. This digital age, with all of its glory and amazing ideas, does have its drawbacks and casualties. One of these is the death of the English language. Writing now has become how clever we can get in 140 characters. If you try and decode these messages with all of their alternative characters for letters and words, they still make no sense. Why are we like this? It is because of the technology that has led up to this point. We are a society of wanting it now and getting it now. Computers have made this possible. It has also made us as a society take short cuts with almost everything. Twitter is a prime example of that. Instantaneous information can be had with a click of a link. It can be a wonderful tool to use to get live, in the moment information. Unfortunately it is also used to slowly strangle the way we talk and express ourselves. For all of the talk about twitter and social media bringing us together, I feel it has made us more isolated.

Thanks for reading!

Lefty