Facebook and Twitter have recently been in the news — and not in a positive way. Some people actually are leaving social networking because they believe it is sharing too much, hence becoming embarrassing, and, more importantly, alienating them from real life.
Nevertheless, nearly every morning when I walk two miles at my nearby mall, I see young mothers pushing toddlers in strollers. While the toddlers either snooze or stare straight ahead, the mothers are having animated conversations — on their cell phones. Imagine my surprise one morning when I walked past a young mother holding a toddler in her arms and talking with her. The baby would answer in gurgles and the mother would answer in sentences. It was a joy to watch — but, unfortunately, a rare occurrence.
With cell phone communication seemingly non stop, not to mention the vast number of emails and texts sent daily, why has the quality of communication so declined? Parents don't talk to children, children don't read — or study languages — and when we sit in front of a computer for hours on end, we sit alone. Small wonder that the caliber of communication has declined.
Several years ago, I took a wonderful trip to Holland and Belgium. So many people — not just our guides — spoke not one or two but as many as five languages fluently: Dutch, Flemish, German, English and French. On a canal boat tour in Bruges, our student guide would speak English to our group, often cracking jokes, then switch to German with another group, obviously telling the same jokes because the tourists were laughing at the same intervals. Then, as we passed another boat, he called out to his buddy in Dutch.
Sadly, here in the States, not only are most students mono-lingual but they also are prone to mistakes in grammar and syntax and often have limited vocabularies. Yet nearly every single one owns the latest smart phone (an ironic name at best) — with all the bells and whistles.
Indeed, as technology expands, literacy declines.
In an article in Prevention Magazine, author Michael Segell describes the potential hazards of electro-magnetic fields caused by constant cell phone use. I still remember the discussions about Lee Atwater, President George H.W. Bush's press secretary, who died young, from a brain tumor. Although it never was proven, many attributed his premature death to his constant cell phone use. A recent Swedish study, also cited in Prevention, suggests that "if you started using a cell phone as a teen, you have a five times greater risk of brain cancer than those who started as an adult."
The Internet also has been under recent fire. In the book, "Shallows — What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains," Nicholas Carr claims, and I agree, that while "the Internet is great for facts, it is not so great for wisdom." Indeed, "the Internet is to news what car horns are to music," says a character in "The Imperfectionists," Tom Rachman's best-selling novel about newspapers.
When we listen to or engage in interesting and/or controversial conversations, or when we read a book, we think, we ruminate. Not so when we get quick information from the Internet. Computers, adds Mr. Carr, are destroying our powers of deep concentration.
Several years ago, in conjunction with a short story course I was teaching at a local college, I had assigned my students brief reports on the famous writers whose works we were reading. Although the students handed out lots of photocopied pages with simple biographical facts and even went so far as to reproduce these pages on a gigantic screen, not one offered any thoughtful comments, analyses or criticism about the writers — or their works — beyond what they reproduced from the Internet. Basic facts, not wisdom, were all they shared.
Finally, technology, like most anything else, should be used with moderation. Extract the best features; a cell phone, for example, comes in handy when driving to a business appointment or to visit a friend and there is an unexpected traffic tie up. It's nice to be able to call to let the person at the other end know you might be late.
A computerized smart phone, too, provides many uses — from instantly sharing news and photos with long-distance friends and relatives to getting driving directions to researching professionals in every area, and, of course, to retrieving myriad facts. But there's still a world out there and we should attempt to experience it, and think about it, first hand.
Lynne Agress, who teaches in the Johns Hopkins Odyssey Program, is president of BWB-Business Writing At Its Best, Inc. She is he author of "The Feminine Irony" and "Working with Words in Business and Legal Writing" (Basic Books), and numerous articles. Her e-mail is lynneagress@AOL.com.