"Disconnected? " Not AWAYS A Bad Thing...
We've come along way from primal drum beat messaging, puffy smoke signals, skinny telegraph wires and poles, privacy compromised (phone) party lines and environmentally unfriendly Styrofoam cups tied together with kite string... when it comes to communicating with each other. Clearly... how, and how much, we communicate with each other has changed enormously in just the last 20 years.
Just a generation or so ago, leaving High School and going to college usually involved separating ourself from family and friends; and then learning to live in a dorm with only a pay phone at the end of the hallway to stay in touch. Everybody knew what it meant to call "collect." Creative types would call home, let it ring three times, then our parents would call back thereby saving us a dime. Sometimes we had to wait in line during lengthy phone calls. We might even have to find a phone on a different floor, while our roommate broke up with his girlfriend. Regardless, that was usually the sole source of communication and that kind of communication happened ONLY when there was something fairly important to talk about. Almost NEVER were those phones used to call friends from home and/or from other colleges. It was just too awkward and inconvenient.
With some exceptions, most of us were cut-off from our past and thrust into those particular social dynamics that forced us to initiate and build new (life-long) relationships, that in turn, usually led to exponential leaps in personal growth. This stemmed largely from the ability to leave behind unhealthy relationships and drop former unflattering or undesirable ways that we were identified by our peers, accrued while in High School. With that kind of communication isolation we could, in fact, kind of "reinvent" ourself without anyone reminding us that we were stepping out of the line of the established mores of social conformity. And often, when we went home for Christmas break... most of our friends noticed an immediate difference in how we matured - personally, socially, intellectually and even spiritually.
I have to wonder the potential negative affects of ALWAYS being connected to not only our present, but also to those myriad relationships from our past. Today, not only do more students drive to other campuses of their former High School friends, they also do the following: Call daily, or weekly from cell phones (all most all students have one), text hourly or even minutely from them as well. And from their computers? Engage in Instant Messaging, Chatrooms, join online communities like Facebook and Myspace, create their own personal Websites and develop Blogs for online publishing. High School and College life is now a monolithic loosely integrated whole, staggering forward and backwards in microscopic mini-steps. It would seem the ability to observe in one another the exponential leaps has faded...
To be sure there are many relationships acquired in High School - particularly family ones, that are necessary to prize, keep and maintain. I am not suggesting, therefore, that the above forms of technology are bad in and of themselves and that we cut off all relationships experienced while in High School... I just wonder how much dead, stultifying weight, those technologies help to produce in leaving, what needs to be left in the past... in the past - not only memories but perhaps some "relationships" as well. Because in High School, one of the clear social axioms is: Your Past Is Ever Before You and Your Future Lies In Your Past. In other words, your social community there, rarely permits you to break out of whatever definition of "who you are," that has been devised for you.
With all of that explicit technological "connectedness," that students have today, and the implicit accountability that comes from it; I fear that it works as a cumbersome drag - keeping "Who they Were in the Past, To What They Are in the Present" unnecessarily. In a sense, the past is never the past, its always the present. Just something to think about
Just a generation or so ago, leaving High School and going to college usually involved separating ourself from family and friends; and then learning to live in a dorm with only a pay phone at the end of the hallway to stay in touch. Everybody knew what it meant to call "collect." Creative types would call home, let it ring three times, then our parents would call back thereby saving us a dime. Sometimes we had to wait in line during lengthy phone calls. We might even have to find a phone on a different floor, while our roommate broke up with his girlfriend. Regardless, that was usually the sole source of communication and that kind of communication happened ONLY when there was something fairly important to talk about. Almost NEVER were those phones used to call friends from home and/or from other colleges. It was just too awkward and inconvenient.
With some exceptions, most of us were cut-off from our past and thrust into those particular social dynamics that forced us to initiate and build new (life-long) relationships, that in turn, usually led to exponential leaps in personal growth. This stemmed largely from the ability to leave behind unhealthy relationships and drop former unflattering or undesirable ways that we were identified by our peers, accrued while in High School. With that kind of communication isolation we could, in fact, kind of "reinvent" ourself without anyone reminding us that we were stepping out of the line of the established mores of social conformity. And often, when we went home for Christmas break... most of our friends noticed an immediate difference in how we matured - personally, socially, intellectually and even spiritually.
I have to wonder the potential negative affects of ALWAYS being connected to not only our present, but also to those myriad relationships from our past. Today, not only do more students drive to other campuses of their former High School friends, they also do the following: Call daily, or weekly from cell phones (all most all students have one), text hourly or even minutely from them as well. And from their computers? Engage in Instant Messaging, Chatrooms, join online communities like Facebook and Myspace, create their own personal Websites and develop Blogs for online publishing. High School and College life is now a monolithic loosely integrated whole, staggering forward and backwards in microscopic mini-steps. It would seem the ability to observe in one another the exponential leaps has faded...
To be sure there are many relationships acquired in High School - particularly family ones, that are necessary to prize, keep and maintain. I am not suggesting, therefore, that the above forms of technology are bad in and of themselves and that we cut off all relationships experienced while in High School... I just wonder how much dead, stultifying weight, those technologies help to produce in leaving, what needs to be left in the past... in the past - not only memories but perhaps some "relationships" as well. Because in High School, one of the clear social axioms is: Your Past Is Ever Before You and Your Future Lies In Your Past. In other words, your social community there, rarely permits you to break out of whatever definition of "who you are," that has been devised for you.
With all of that explicit technological "connectedness," that students have today, and the implicit accountability that comes from it; I fear that it works as a cumbersome drag - keeping "Who they Were in the Past, To What They Are in the Present" unnecessarily. In a sense, the past is never the past, its always the present. Just something to think about
