On Friday night, I went to a baseball game where my hometown Yankees were ingloriously destroyed by the Tampa Bay Devils. My long hiatus from this blog can be explained by the consequent mourning period, combined with my Harry Potter reading.
I was at the game with two friends and each of us knew people in New York. So after the game, we wanted to get in touch with all our different contacts and figure out where to meet for drinks and food. As we stood in the stadium, each of us on our cellphones for 15, 20 minutes but not speaking to each other, I laughed to myself. How strangely antisocial the technology was making us.
Then we decided to call a fourth friend whose number no one had in their phones. His number, we knew, was posted on his Facebook page, but of course, none of us was by a computer. But my mother happens to be very high tech and she is not only on Facebook, but friends with my friends. [Mothers on Facebook is a topic for its own article].
I proceeded to call her and ask her to sign online and text message the number to me. It gets better, because my mother's phone was losing service, so she dictated the number to me quickly over the phone. I read it aloud to one of the friends at the game with me, who typed it into his phone and texted it back to me. At this point, it was taking three cell phones and a computer to connect me and the one friend I wanted to meet up with.
Our solitary phone calling at first made me think that technology cuts people off from each other, which you sometimes here the cynics say. We'll all sit at home and shop over Amazon and Second Life and never go out. TIn my house, my mother, sister and I sometimes sit in the same room on our respective laptops without speaking to each other.
The ridiculous hoops we were jumping through seem to support the other cynical view that technology makes human interaction more complicated. But the knowledge that we might never have met up with the fourth friend without three phones and a laptop makes me wonder if technology facilitates real world connections.
Does technology make the world bigger and lonelier as we surf an ever expanding web and listen to our iPods but stop noticing people in the streets? Or does technology make the world smaller and more social, linking us to people we might never meet otherwise? Silly as my Friday night adventures may seem, this is the million dollar/pound question of the moment. Anybody want to venture an answer?
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The Million Dollar/Pound Question
