Technology cannot replace people and quality of conversations.
As an undergraduate student who moved away from my hometown, I started using a mobile phone for the first time in the late 2000s. I remember my uncle presenting the device to me before I left home to start life in the beautiful town of Dharwad!
A mobile phone was considered a prized possession for students of my age then. It helped me stay in touch with my parents or should I say “in their radar”? However, my father would insist that I write letters. I thoroughly enjoyed that! Our letters would cover a wide range of topics about my coursework, teachers, weather, my roommates and the menu in the mess. My father would write about how important it is to stay focused with anecdotes about events at home. The chain of conversations would knit into a great story as my exams neared! Letters brought so much laughter and of course, tears too leading to some smudged ink and lost words!
Over the next few years, emails took over and we enjoyed the speed with which we connected. I could share photos and see pictures of my family! This brought joy and I felt proud about how my parents and I adapted to new technology. However, in e-mails, long stories turned into short commentaries and sentences into words. The banter was off and the conversations seemed to have lost the human touch. We then switched to smartphones. Some messaging services connected us even faster. The urgency to quickly share a snapshot of my life with parents and friends, near and far, excited me. There was a parallel space and we seemed to spend more time carried away in this bubble.
As the applications updated, we all needed to pace and catch up. In the quest to constantly stay connected, we disconnected from the present! The older generation, including my parents, leapfrogged to embrace this advanced tech to stay in touch. Eventually the updates outpaced us. Life changed before we could realise how! As much as all this helped build “connections”, it sapped the human-ness out of conversations. Writing and talking with each other, looking in the eye, without looking at our phones, is perhaps the greatest gift we can give each other.
Let’s talk again?
anupama.ivaturi@adelaide.edu.au
