Late Night Fiction It’s all in your mind

Communication and lack thereof

I'm tired of this social networking crap. People take it too far.

I look at these people try and talk and make plans through comments. For wanting to "talk" so much, enough to take time out of our day to compose a message to a person that everyone in the world can view, we must not want to talk that much. Maybe I'm missing the whole point of this social networking thing, maybe it's supposed to desensitize communication between everyone. Of course! Give everyone a way to easily find anyone, so they can go ahead and talk to them from a safe distance! Don't want to actually let them see you talking, of course.

Maybe I've grown out of that stage. I always thought it was bullshit, but not quite as much as I do now. I spent the last month and a half with a girl two years older than me and the difference between her and people, kids (relatively), my age, is astounding. They all do it. They leave comments, they want to make plans. They "miss" someone else, they want to hang out. They go back and forth over the course of a few hours trying to figure out schedules, when they're free, what they'll do. For chrissake it may not be as new as the internet but we humans have a faster way of communicating (screw cable speeds) called the telephone. It doesn't compare to talking face-to-face, but it allows you to hear someone's tone, a little more emotion, than simply CAPS and :)'s.

I don't know about anyone else, but language can hardly do justice to what I'm thinking. If the basis of all communication, words, can't even get 100% of the thoughts people think, well we have face-to-face conversation. We can see emotions. When we can't be close we can talk on the phone. We can't see, but at least we can hear emotions. When the phone is just too much human interaction for us, we have the computer. Instant Messaging (at least it's instant) and the likes of Myspace and Facebook take care of us hear. Problem is: we have to read emotions now? Oh, we're using our eyes. To interpret with our own minds the words and punctuation another person used to get the idea across. It's not hard to see how much the communication is degraded.