Failure to Communicate

Failure to Communicate

 “What we have here is…failure to communicate.” That was a line from the 1967 movie “Cool Hand Luke” starring Paul Newman. I find it odd in this day and age of computers, cell phones, ipads, etc. that we still seem to often have a “failure to communicate”.  I bought my first computer in 1994 (Windows 3.1) and it was an amazing thing to me. It opened up a whole new world. I was living in Nashville, TN at the time and most of my family still lived in Texas. My father was the first to get a computer and encouraged me and my brother to do the same. We were fascinated by how easy it was to keep in touch via e-mail. Then my brother and I discovered MIRC. It was a chat platform quite a bit better than AOL’s chat lines. At first we loved chatting with people all over the country and even the world. But then they came out with tons of these little pictograms which were pictures made from the characters on your standard keyboard. That got annoying enough after a while. Then they came out with something called .wavs. These were bits of songs or music that you could post in your chat room and everyone else could hear it. Soon that’s the only thing showing up in the chat rooms. My brother and I created our own chat room…no pics or wavs allowed! Only chat. It was great for about a year, but it dwindled until my brother and I were the only ones still going there. I moved back to TX in 2000 so face to face communication was back in. I heard it talked about a lot around that time about how e-mail was killing the U.S. Postal Service because everyone was just writing emails and not sending letters anymore. I got big on email too for a while. Then all I kept getting was spam and forwarded “joke of the day” that I never read. I have the same email account I had back in the ‘90’s and it’s still mostly filled up with spam. No one writes anymore. I don’t think the Post Office needs to worry about that. E-mail got replaced by texting on cell phones. And so obviously did spelling and grammar. Now those will probably get replaced by something like Skype and writing will disappear altogether. There are already computer programs that let you talk to your computer—no need to type anything ever. I have a feeling that someday, my machine will talk to your machine and leave you and me out of the loop completely. The biggest problem I see, though, with communication these days is that if you take away idle gossip, most people don’t have anything else to talk about. Or they are afraid to express their opinions because there is a need to be “politically correct”.  People are afraid to talk about Religion, Philosophy, Politics, or even Current Events for fear of offending someone -- except on the internet where they can do it anonymously. And then they are called crazies. So if we communicate at all, we prattle on about nothing but mundane things. If you could put together a book with all your text messages in it from over the past year, do you think it would be worth reading?  So it seems to me, even though we keep coming up with better and better ways to communicate, we’re doing less and less of it.