Lost in Translation

I can’t help but feel we are wasting our greatest resource and getting further off the path by giving into technology. Instead of spending quality time with people and interacting with them live and in person; we call, email, instant message, text and blog. They are all poor substitutes and distract us from what’s really important.

Human communication is made up of everything from physiological changes, body language, voice inflections, speech, and much more that gets lost in the technology translation. So much of our communication is non-verbal, and text on a screen isn’t what I’m talking about. How many times have you known a good friend is having a bad day by their facial expressions, verse a text message they sent you?

I get about ten visitors to my blog a day. I have no idea by whom and they rarely leave comments. I get about five text messages a day, sadly I have started to reply to most of them. I have some friends that I email more than I see or even talk to, regretfully I can’t seem to hang on to them.

Sure with technology we can do more, but really what are we doing more of and at what cost? I find I spent far too little time face to face with the people I care about most and these substitute forms of communication are only distracting me from the quality interaction we all need - when it comes to communication, I‘m taking quality over quantity.

“The greatest danger isn’t that machines will begin to think like people, but that people will begin to think like machines”
“It is appallingly obvious our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

- Albert Einstein

Time did an article on this last month, I read it at the doc's office this afternoon.