Monday Moaning: Social Discouragement!
We might not look at it that way but everywhere we look we are discouraged to be social. Or social in a personal way that is.
A strong statement maybe, but as one who used to believe in progress of small machines I now discover a flip side. Even while loving electronics and the likes. Wanting to be the first who used new techniques, I never stopped being a social person.
I hoped or thought they would be there to help us but now they pretty much control us. And we are getting blinded to this, while we cry Social behaviour.
Now I am not a doctor or studied some physiological or behavioural stuff, the following is pure based on observation and a personal/ small environment.
The most silly or even worst example and yet the most common that changed dramatically might just be tourism. Now surely I cannot speak for everyone else, though even visiting another town can make you feel a tourist. As I am staying in what is considered a town you must have visited as a tourist, I see a lot of them.
Now there is noting wrong with a bus of tourists unloading, but each and every one of them are spending looking down on a tablet.As it tells them where to go unlike having to read a map. It tells them by pointing and clicking information about what they are clicking at. Everything is automated and thorough. We can see the benefits as a lot of information is given.
But there is one thing missing in this whole situation.
It is called socializing with the locals. Okay we can order a cup of coffee other than that a local is nothing more than a extra filling in a gap where there should be people. Pretty sure it sound strange, but there is no interaction other than that. A time once existed tourists tried talking to get to know about the place. Ask the direction with a map in their hands.
As mobile phones and tablets have taken that away the conversations have died as well. Or at least most of them. A guide is not necessary anymore. The human link if you will is completely deleted.
I get it is far fetched but how did you look at it. As normal? Didn’t think much of it?
Though it does not end here. It shows we turned blind or deaf or however one would want to describe it. We think these things are normal.
Yet how normal are they when we cry for more socializing. More human contact. We hear a bell ring but can’t see the hammer. Or something like that.
Everywhere we look we need or more correctly we are told to download apps to help improve our life.
Silly we rather look down on a screen to see what the weather is like rather than look up.
Asking for a pen on the street to write something down, as common as it was the interaction is gone. I am pretty sure many still remember using that phrase. Finding our way has become an automated pilot in the form of a phone. We can’t orientate ourselves anymore with out one. So asking our direction is gone.
At the teller of a grocery store less and less time is used talking. Cafés are more like walk through coffee bars. And if we sit down we check our phones.
Business class has been like that for ages reading there paper but that was more a form of showing of their power and wealth. Pretending to be important.
But we with a phone are starting to do the same.
As for the electronic lover in me. I love new gadgets and like trying them out. But more and more I am losing the human link. And feel less human myself when I am deeply pulled down this new social gathering. Though to me it isn’t as social as I once thought. To me it started meaning something opposite of what we are doing.
Each app plays on the fact it is what they consider social. On TV in commercials in magazines. Even our children are infected by app that help you choose a colour, see if the sun is burning on your head, Tell you the amount of snow 200 miles away since you be going there in two weeks time. And now cars are being full blown social media devices.That way we can socialize while driving in a tin can on wheels.
We stopped talking to the people next to us in the same library for example. Asking if they knew of a good book, since they were standing in the same category isle. We don’t ask anything we just do on an automated pilot. Finding a restaurant has become a easy task, though it is a social gathering most the time a spur of the moment, you check in in the first you would have come across.
Now we can order a drink before we even set food inside the bar.
So though we ask and shout for more socializing we are becoming more and more, I can’t say individualized as it would mean we do everything our self and have a thought of our own, our own thinking, I think we are more and more becoming a cogwheel in a machine pretending to socialize.
A lamb following others. And if we are then who is the sheppard? And don’t say God.
So as I walk down the streets I see people looking down rather then up. NOt because they are feeling sad but because that is where their world is.
All these programs and app to make life easy and speed things up so we can save time.
But what are we saving time for when we don’t even use it to truly socialize.
Everything around us is like discouraging to be social.
