Communicating through Technology

After the class discussion we had on Friday, it opened my eyes to how differently people felt about all of the topics we discussed. Some of the topics we talked about that were most intriguing to me were: technology, “infections” or addictions, and escapism. What I noticed that I thought was pretty interesting was that it seemed like the boys in the class had similar opinions about these topics and the girls in the class had similar opinions.

Technology is consistently expanding; people are coming up with more and more technological devices where I feel like the interaction between people face to face is decreasing. People have so many different options to choose from to communicate for example: Plurk, Facebook, texting, talking on the phone, email, Myspace, Skype, AOL instant messaging, etc. By having all of these options it cuts down the time that people have to communicate face to face with each other.

These communication systems are useful for sending out group announcements, communication for business deals, long distance friendships or relationships, and many more. However interacting with people face to face is a great social skill that people really only learn by experiencing. I do believe that it is an important social skill to have and people should learn how to interact with people when talking in person instead of relying on communicating through technology. When you are talking to someone through technology devices you don’t get a good grasp of who they are. If you were communicating to them in person you get to see their personality, hear their tone of voice, you can tell if someone is lying about something easier, or just to see their facial expressions to the things you said or things they have said. Even though I continue to say that I think face to face communication is better if you want to “connect” with the person, but I would have to admit that once you do start up one of these communication systems most of the time you become addicted.

Some people might not want to create one of these technology communication systems because they don’t want to get sucked into or “infected” with the technology world, they would rather have old fashioned face to face communication. People might be afraid of getting addicted to certain communication systems. I for example, wasn’t sure about the whole idea of facebook, I was contemplating on whether to make a page or not. When I officially did I quickly became addicted to the whole thing, now I check it almost every day or even a few times a day. I am now infected with the technology form of communication, but I am happy. I don’t think I would be able to delete my facebook at this time. In a way this connects with the movie we watched in class called Shivers. Some of the characters were afraid or unsure about getting infected with parasites, but once they were infected they were happy and probably wouldn’t want to go back. People in the real world are unsure about all of the technology changes happening today, but once they get infected they usually don’t want to go back to how it was before.

These forms of technological communications can be a way for someone to escape the real world and imagine they are a different person or in a different world. Another technology device that I think people reach to for escapism is video games. I think when people play video games they imagine they are the character they are playing and escape the world they are living in for awhile. Most types of video games allow you to pretend or imagine that you are the actual character in the game you are playing such as; Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 you can even talk on a head set working with other people playing, but you are still most likely imagining you are the character you are playing and not yourself. The SIM’s game you can create different characters that don’t necessarily have to be yourself you can create whoever you want. Even the racing games you can imagine you’re a different character because you can change views to where it looks like you are looking out the windshield of the car and the remote control vibrates sometimes when you crash. All of these topics resemble the change in humans while technology continues to create more and more devices to where maybe someday we won’t even need to communicate face to face with anyone anymore because we can just do that through the computers, cell phones, video games, or whatever else they come up with in the near future.