Is it possible to miss something that you have never experienced in your life? Often times l find myself missing the 1800s where people would use Pigeons to deliver messages. It amazes me how they could trust birds to deliver messages but when l look back it seems like it's a way better method than the methods we have right now.
Remember those times where someone will send a letter and it will take months for the receiver to read it. It will take over a year for two people to finish a conversation. Remember those days drums where used to pass messages of war, death and announcing important events. It's amazing that they would understand what it's rhythm meant. They had to be banned by the slave traders because they were being used by the slaves to communicate over long distances in a code unknown to their enslavers. But that did not stop them from communicating, they invented secret symbols.
Those symbols have been transformed into emojis. Everything is now instant. A message is received in a second. Calls make you feel like you are talking to someone sitting right besides you.
These days we no longer do most of our conversations with our mouths but with out fingers. We have the ability to talk to over twenty people at the same time without opening your mouth. Which makes me think, is it better than the old times? Of course, it's fast and it removes the impatience of waiting for the receiver to reply. But is it helping our communication skills?
Let's take short hand writing for example. Is it because of lack of time that we remove all vowels in words? Is it because we want to save time and what do you wanna save it for? It's no longer our mouths forming these words, but it's all in the fingers. Which makes me question again, doesn't this also remove the emotion effect in conversations? It's different when you hear the sound of your words and can feel the impact it will make to the receiver.
I am not against the communications we have right now but l am concerned about how it will be like a decade from now. Already people prefer conversations on Facebook or Whatsapp than face to face. We now hang out on FaceTime, Skype and Zoom. We have managed to make our fingers talk on our behalf. Even to simple things like buying food, we use our fingers to order food. We buy everything from clothes, furniture and even most services with our fingers.
As the times are changing, let it not negatively affect our communications behavior. A lot of hate speeches are being posted every day all because when we talk with fingers our emotions are being diluted.
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