Incommunicado

So clearly, I got lazy and waited until today to resume posting. Please forgive me. I’ve been trapped in Oblivion and HoMM V since last week and only now managed to pry myself away from them long enough to make this post. Look for impressions on both of these games in the next week or two, but considering how much time I’ve been spending with them, I think it’s safe to say that I’m enjoying them.

An interesting thought I had recently was about the paradox of modern communication: as a society, we’re more connected than we’ve ever been and yet, feelings of isolation are as pervasive as ever. Why is that? Shouldn’t we feel less alone, now that we can receive a friend’s words or voice from half-way around the world in an instant? I don’t have an easy answer, but I can relate a few of my own experiences with this troubling contradiction and, with some luck, they’ll provide some insight into the matter.

I think cell phones best embody this paradox. I resisted getting one for a long time because I didn’t want to be “that guy”. You know him. He’s the one who doesn’t turn off his phone during a movie. Or he talks far too loudly about personal matters in excruciating detail. Or maybe he’s on the phone constantly, narrating his every step to his friend. Or perhaps he’s out with his friends but still on his phone, completely ignoring everyone around him. I associate these problems of, what I guess can be termed, over-communication with cell phones, simply because these activities weren’t possible in such a convenient fashion before the cell phone.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to avoid being “that guy” so far. And while I certainly wouldn’t give up my cell phone at this point, having used one for a couple of years now, I do find these phones to be the target of much of my scorn on a daily basis.

My love-hate relationship with the cell phone is exacerbated by the expectations that go along with it. When my cell phone isn’t ringing and I’m not in the middle of something (i.e. class, work, etc.), I’m waiting for it to ring, hoping that someone will call me and invite me somewhere. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case; most of the time, I have to be the initiator (instigator?) and call others in order to get anything to happen.

And this returns me to my original point, which is that my cell phone, on the whole, actually makes me feel more isolated from the world, rather than more connected to it. Every hour that I have my cell phone on and I don’t receive a call, it’s a reminder that I don’t have as many friends as I’d like. Or, more likely, that my friends are busy with their own lives and concerns, just as I am. Or somewhere in between. Hard to say for certain.

Finally, we arrive, albeit indirectly, at the crucial realization: the cell phone doesn’t create the feeling of isolation; it merely heightens our societal expectations about how frequently we should be in communication with one another. Thus, because of the cell phone, we expect to hear from others more than we did in the past, by which I mean the time before the widespread adoption of the cell phone. Whereas once it was the norm to not hear from friends for days at a time, today, we get antsy after a matter of hours.

To conclude somewhat abruptly these disparate thoughts, I’m reminded of a quote that was referenced in the movie Good Night, and Good Luck, which I saw again a few days ago: “Cassius was right, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves…’” In case it isn’t clear enough, replace “stars” with “technology”, and I think you’ll see what I mean.