Conversation - Death by Internet | Not What It Used To Be

In what seems like a lifetime ago I promised mobile phones and technology for the second part of this article on how the art of conversation is not what it used to be… So, with no further ado it’s mobile phones and technology I deliver.

Once again fear stalks these halls; what seems sadly endemic in this modern society. But more of that later.

At the risk of sounding like quite the little Luddite, I accuse the proliferation of modern technology and unnecessary gadgetry for the breakdown in conversation, even more so than the lack of common ground between young and old. And how ironic that the most dangerous assassin out there could well be the very thing you’re reading this on. The internet.

Indeed, the internet and a variety of other modern technologies are putting an end to the long tradition of the human being as a verbal communicator. I mean, who needs to talk when they’ve got a 40″ widescreen LCD TV burning a shadow into the wallpaper; a 160GB ipod; a PS3; and an 18mbps broadband connection, doing all the talking for them? Or why speak to somebody on the phone when you can send them a garbled message by SMS?

- R u cuming 2 pub?
- No

Hardly Oscar Wilde.

Textspeak (as it’s known) is to conversation, what the Prime Minister is to world politics. It’s the next step in the evolution of the English language, an unfortunate example of Darwin’s natural selection eliminating letters deemed surplus by lazy thumbs. Granted, it can sometimes be necessary if trying to cram a particularly long and equally offensive joke into the restrictive character limit of a single text, but the majority of the time this isn’t the case.

And then there’s the internet with its emails, IMs, Facebooks, MySpaces, Stumbleupons, Twitters, Plurks, Berks and Numpties, as well as a multitude of other sites, apps, and devices stealing the words from our nation’s collective lips.

Who needs real friends when you can make friends with millions of faceless entities the world over?

It’s become an online popularity contest with people collecting friends like the Victorian landed gentry might once have collected butterflies. People you’ve never met, nor are ever likely to meet; or you haven’t seen in over ten years and wouldn’t have anything in common with or anything to say to in the unlikely event you ever met again in real life.

And that’s where the appeal of these networks lies to an increasingly insular population too scared to look out of the window for fear of what atrocity might rear its ugly head next. We need never leave the imagined safety of our homes again.

Why on earth would we want to talk to each other in this day and age? We live in a world where a comment, however innocuous, can result in pint glass to the face; a knife between the ribs; a bullet in the gut; or finding yourself hauled up before the beak answering to some crazy politically correct charge brought in to drive an even greater wedge through the middle of an already divided nation.

So perhaps the internet isn’t the conversation killer I first imagined. Perhaps it merely reflects the need in the real world to fill an aching gap that festers like an open sore at the very heart of society. Indeed, if I really believed it was I’d be out practicing what I preached, stood on some street corner and berating the world from there. But I know which side my bread’s buttered; I’m what we would once have referred to as ‘a bit of a hypocrite’; and it’s that blatant hypocrisy that allows me to embrace the ‘evils’ of modern technology and spout this nonsense for two simple reasons.

1) It’s a nice and handy.
2) It’s infinitely safer.

Stand in one place for too long in this day and age and you’re liable to be clamped, towed away, arrested, or robbed.

You have been warned.

There… I’ve nothing left to say…

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