A Better Pencil 7-12

Sometimes I just want to be left alone. My farther told me that my grandfather used to unplug the telephone during dinner. He hated the thought that anyone with his number could choose to call and disrupt his family during a meal. I really feel like I agree with this. Baron presents a great deal of information about different digital mediums of communication in chapter 8. He presents them using language I associate with selling a car. This car has airbags and abs, that car has automatic windows. IM is instantaneous while e-mail can be ignored. All of it makes me slightly uncomfortable. I like choosing to talk to people. Contrary to the popular saying, talk is not cheep. I like to choose when to engage in conversations with people because it takes a lot of effort to have a good conversation and I don't often want to squander this effort on the amazing thing your dog just did. Really I would say that most of the time I just want to be left to myself.

Texting is even worse then IM. I would say that for most people my age texting has really replaced IM. I find this really annoying because it means that your always connected. You can always close down an IM program and be left in peace. However shutting off my phone is much harder. I want to have it on so I can respond to emergency's but this also means that I have no way to stop being pestered by texts. I wish there way a way to put a polite message on my phone letting people know that I am not accepting texts at this time and to please try back later.

I find this whole book somewhat interesting because the author obviously loves this stuff. You can hear the excitement in his voice when he talks about all these new ways to talk to other people. But to me there not new ways to talk to other people. The are more or less similar to how communication has worked for most of my life. I find myself annoyed with these "new" communication technologies in much the same way that I am sure the phone bugged my grandfather. What right do others have to interrupt my peace on a whim. I feel like all these new technologies are pushing us to disclose facts about ourselves that really are no ones business. Face book is another grate example of this. It has a place for me to put what I am thinking or feeling. No one really wants you to put down what your actually thinking or feeling tough because that would be weird. Could you imagine if you logged into face book and saw someone had put "Tim Somebody is thinking about how he would really like to murder his landlord, he even has the perfect spot for the body". What is expected in that space is for you to put something fun and lighthearted.

When it comes right down to it I feel like the humanity is slowly leeching away from our communication. When your always connected that connection looses some of its meaning. There is a section in things fall apart that mentions why people gather together to watch the moon. Its not because they cannot watch the moon from there own hut, because surely they can do that, but rather they do so because it is good to gather. What happens when were all gathering all the time? We certainly wouldn't want to all live in the same hut but that is where technology is taking us.