The art of connecting with fellow human beings in person is dying. That’s dangerous... for life
If there were any fears about imaginary androids taking over the human world, they are getting worryingly real if a study done for Cancer Research UK is any indication. It showed that 44 per cent of 18-24-year-olds say they feel more comfortable speaking to people they are meeting for the first time through social media, messaging apps and other online means, rather than in person. Only 37 per cent of this age category said they felt more comfortable speaking to people they did not know face-to-face, compared to more than two-third of those aged 55 and over. The new study found young adults were also around 20 times more likely to never speak to their neighbours compared to just one per cent of those aged 55 and over. And though this group is most likely to use public transport, they never chat with commuters or engage them with a smile with half of them preferring to remain plugged in to their headphones and shutting out the world, as it were. The atomised, deracinated human being is with us.
The breakdown of human communication in a digital world has been the subject of much research and many surveys with some worrying conclusions. Some experts see this kind of isolation as a receding and retractive matrix that increasingly makes one teeter over the edge and plunge into the depths of depression, loneliness, insignificance and fruitlessness. In the end, researchers say, this leads to early mortality and even suicides. This is truly a paradox. At one level, digital civilisation connects the world to your palm, helping you engage with hundreds of friends and lose yourself in endless hours of conversation online. But the problem with this form of social engagement is that the chat box is about being 'cool' and appearing to be in command of your life. After all, one is part of the competitive projections of 500 other charmed lives, where emojis simplify emotions rather than peeling the complex shades that constitute them. Even though there are a plethora of support groups for human deficiencies, the connection is about commiserating and unburdening, hearing each other’s stories, rather than evolving a dialogue on recuperative strategies. The problem with the keypad generation is that inoculated with one form of communicative strategy, they find themselves hopelessly ill-equipped to communicate anything beyond the limits of digital vocabulary. Human relationships are formed on the basis of engagement of all our five senses and intangibles like emotional and spiritual quotient. They are as much tactile as intellectual, as much full-bodied as sentient. While younger people have found out new ways of enhancing the core dialogue between humans, it must be remembered that the penumbra can never become the umbra.
