The new era of communications...and less people to communicate with!

You had answering machines and the people you knew wouldn’t leave messages. You never knew who was calling.  You never could identify who left you, the recorded... “click”.

Now you have caller ID, so you can see who is calling you or see what people called when you were out. People you know swear up and down you are screening your calls to determine if you want to talk to them or not.   You tell them that the kids deleted the messages, or you don’t always check it.  They look at you with suspicion. They call and get no answer, and in their minds they know you are there, but just don’t want to talk to them. Caller ID drives a wedge between you and the people you know.

Then there is call waiting. You don’t want to miss any calls even when your on the phone with someone else. It never fails they hit the “flash” and the person on the other line is more important than your conversationg with them.   So you tell them you will call them back. This is why I call the feature, call rudeness. It never fails, the person who beeps in, is always more important than the current conversation. Or sometimes the other person decides they won’t answer it and your left wondering...”do they do that to me when I call”?

You have email, but when you write, the essence of what your trying to say is lost in the “quick emails” that you send out. Your emails are not interpreted in the way that you meant them. You decide to foward junk mail and jokes that you recieve just so you can stay in touch but you don't dare attempt to write a letter to them. It could be taken wrong, misunderstood or worst, you could be accused of being too long winded and you find out they didn't read it anyway.

We subscribe to plans that lets us talk further for less, we have caller ID to see who is calling and we have call waiting so we don’t miss any calls. Then we subscribe to the internet so we can have email so we can communicate easier. In no time at all we are communicating with less people, saying less and the people we end up talking to most of the time are the ones,  who live so close we could walk next door and speak to them personally. These same features and devices that were supposed to improve communications does nothing,  but drive a wedge between you and the people you are trying to improve communications with.

The bottom line here is that we are subscribing to new ways of communication and are just pissing people off with it. We should go back to using smoke signals or messages in a bottle. At least we weren't pissing people off!

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