Yesterday I was thinking about how nobody asks anyone how their day was, anymore. When I was growing up, in the eighties and nineties, my [admittedly wildly dysfunctional] family would generally discuss their days with each other, around the dinner table. "How was your day?" or "What did you do today?" we would ask. Sometimes the stories were great to hear. A sense of anticipation hung in the air at times, because the stories had been allowed some time to simmer and stew, their flavors had mellowed and combined, and the resulting dinner table story was all the better for it.
I don't even own a dinner table. My one-time dinner table is now in the second bedroom, which we call the art or project room. It is where we work on various projects, and a table is a handy thing to have in there.
I live in a typical small two bedroom apartment, and the dining area and living room are one big space. The dining area is where we have our two gaming PC's. The living room end of the space is where we have a couch, chair, and two bookshelves.
Our main bedroom is, naturally, the bedroom. No tv anywhere in the house, but we do watch netflix and hulu on the PC's a lot. And we always eat at our desks. I wonder how many people are living this way? Probably not a lot, but I bet a lot more than I would imagine. Of course we'll never know, because anyone who really lives like I do doesn't respond to surveys very often.
Okay, so in my house, we couldn't really sit around the dinner table having dinner and ask about each other's day. But of course, we never ask. Not because we don't care, but because we pretty much already know. We chat online while he's at work, and I look for work. We talk on the phone a couple times a day. We look forward to spending time together smoking pot, playing video games, and watching cool shit.
But I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to turn my PC off for 48 hours at a time. Say, noon on Tuesday through noon on Wednesday. What would it be like to actually LOOK at Carlos instead of just listen to him 99% of my life. Hell, even when we're having sex, it's usually at night, in the dark. What would it be like to not know what his day was like, and to ask, that evening, over dinner? Perhaps even while eating without watching something.
My parents seemed to look foward to each other coming home when I was young, mostly because unless someone got interrupted at their desk at work, there was little opportunity for immediate communication then. Without cell phones or email, regular interruptions for an employee at work taking too many personal calls at their desk usually meant punishment - up to and including termination. The idea twenty years ago was that when you were at work, you worked, and worked on work, and only on work, and that was that. For most of the day, anyway. You got your breaks, and most managers would look the other way if there was an occasional conversation that didn't last more than 90 seconds or so. But outside that, communication was meant to be about business only.
Seems rather totalitarian now, but it's really not long ago. I am 32, and started working 16 years ago. Yes, that's half my life, but for crying in the rain I hope I have at least two, if not three more 16-year-chunks ahead of me. But given my lifestyle, it's probably closer to two.
So it wasn't that long ago. And now it's practically unheard of, no pun intended. And I think that while this evolution allows us to communicate more quickly, I think the intimacy and quality of our communication and interaction is drastically reduced. I think of it sort of fractally... where the smaller the measurement, the greater the distance produced. I think this follows. The tighter, shorter, and faster our communication becomes, especially when those evolutions are catalyzed by the introduction of a layer of technology as our conscious focus (as opposed to the human beings using that technology), the greater the distance between us.
I mean to say that if we were two primitives who spoke totally different languages standing on opposite sides of the grand canyon, looking through a glass to see each other standing on the other side looking back, having our first consciousness of the other - ever - we would be several orders of magnitude closer to each other than two people on opposite ends of the crosstown bus sending each other twitters about what so and so was wearing such and such event last night.
I love technology and I always have. I love buttons, and I love pushing them. I love getting the results, analyzing them, and punching more buttons. I love machines, especially electronics, and I love playing with them. I love tinkering with them, taking them apart, and putting them back together. I love using things in ways they were not intended to make something I think is way cooler and better than the sum of its parts.
But I do not love the increased sense of isolation I have felt in the world, as these things have grown. I do not love being alone or lonely, and I do not love fearing that one day I will look up and discover, much to my surprise, that I didn't realize Carlos looked like that.
All I'm saying is that if I really want to be hyper-connected, perhaps the connection I should be making is one that can't be made with a machine.
