Restoring Humanity

I had an unusual conversation today. With my carer.

It was only unusual to the extent that, perhaps sensibly, not every conversation that we have feels with hindsight as if it might change your whole life.

In some respects, everything we do or say should have the capacity to represent who and• what we began and are as people. As human beings.

But of course, in the modern world, it is not typical that we reveal ourselves always honestly and with clarity.

The conversation was at one level simply concerning an advertisement for promoting the numerous ways in which it is possible these days to watch television. Using portable devices that have in the last couple of years changed mobile telephones into multi media devices connected by the Internet so that they can receive television, and to be connected to social networking sites, from virtually anywhere that we find ourselves.

This is all in simple terms a natural progression from the simple technology of mobile telephones.

 But as the conversation developed, we began to talk about the way in which it is on most impossible to engage in a one-to-one conversation without the other person responding to the insistent demands of their communication device.

If for example they receive a text message, or some notification of something trivial from their social networking friends.

A little later in the afternoon, I have had in effect a continuation of this conversation, in the context of a discussion about the way in which people are losing their basic human communication skills, as they become more and more dependent upon these communication devices.

Devices which are often a consistent and continuous means of connection to our network of friends, but at the same time as they provide a continuous connection, to that network of social contacts, they have begun to trivialise the way in which we communicate and remain in contact with our friends.

There is a very real sense in which there is a danger that these devices become a substitute for the face-to-face communication and contact with which we are all very familiar.

 But with which perhaps inevitably we will begin to lose our competence with. It is not difficult to perceive the rapid development of these communication devices as something that is getting in the way of what has for decades been the normative behaviour of most people. To talk and to listen to others and by so doing to share ideas with other people.

Perhaps it is simply that human behaviour is evolving as rapidly as this technology is developing.

This week, a good friend of mine experienced the loss of his handheld communication device, quite simply it got fried, so that its overnight charging submit deprived him of his only means of communicating with the world, because he had one of these devices that connect to the Internet, and enable all of his social interaction.

And the management of his diary, via the Internet.

Sudden loss of this device becomes a disabling event. As he had become totally accustomed to make most of his social contacts through this single means.

And so, suddenly, in my afternoon conversation about just this subject, the idea came to me that perhaps there is a need to rescue humanity from itself.

To restore those more basic means of human interaction, which are already suffering as a consequence of these technological devices.

I learned a new word this afternoon, which describes this process of somebody not paying full attention to a conversation, because they are trying to answer a text message at the same time as they are participating in a human conversation.

When I heard this word, it struck me immediately that it was in reality simply a euphemism for what otherwise we might think of as somebody simply being downright rude.

And my first thought was, that we should call this thing what it really is.

Rudeness. Because that is what it is. Not slubbing.