More better communication

In August, 1981, MTV was unleashed upon the world and the first video ever played was a silly song called Video Killed the Radio Star. The song was allegedly inspired by a J.G. Ballard story. It’s a lamentation that with new technology comes the passing of “the good old days of…” fill in the blank. As if something new is a threat and that in the face of this new something, something else must fall by the wayside.

But video, of course, didn’t really kill the radio star. Radio is still alive and kicking. It’s different than it was in the 80s, yes, but it’s hardly gone.

Along these lines, apparently there are still some folks who hold that the internet is ruining communication, that people are sucked into their Laptops of Isolation and talking less to one another and, you know, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket but we’re too busy looking at our monitors to notice or discuss this amongst ourselves.

Maybe people are “talking” differently, but sure wouldn’t say they’re talking less. The computer is a platform that allows the sharing of many things—memories, thoughts, stories, pictures, videos. I’m weary of the technology being labeled as some addiction, as if we must be cured of using our computers.

When you get a letter in the mail, you don’t think, “Ugh, paper!” or “Oh, here’s another example of my addiction to paper!” You think, “Oh cool, a letter!” It’s a good thing. Letters don’t replace conversations, they augment the way we relate to each other. Same goes for emails and IMs and blog posts and websites.

Snail mail hasn’t gone away. Phone calls haven’t gone away. People still gather in public places and talk face to face. Sure there was a time when, if you wanted to share vacation pictures, you whipped out an envelope of hard copy photos. Now you show off digital images via a laptop screen or an iPod. It’s still sharing.

I contend that the bottom line is we communicate more, not less. Are we still learning the best ways to use some of these electronic offerings? Sure. Do some people use the virtual world to escape the real world? Yes. But that’s the exception, not the rule.

None of these communication methods are mutually exclusive. We simply have more ways to deal with different types of communication effectively. We’ll get better at it soon enough :)