Writing, Communicating and Chatting
I reckon most of us do not receive written personalised letters anymore, nor write any to socialise with others. Even exchanged love notes are in texted electronic messages. Maybe the grocery list is still handwritten.
So called snail mail has been sadly reduced to advertising pamphlets. Contemporary society has practically done away with the pleasures of beautiful handwriting and we are reduced to only being agile with our thumbs.
Elegant writing instruments have become more rare and inevitably redundant. We do not have to sit up properly to communicate - more often than not we are not poised in ergonomic body positions when using electronic screens.
An increasing number of us are not fully aware of our environment when we text on smart phones walking across busy streets and when driving vehicles. A whole generation has lost the significance of spelling correctly and become infatuated wirh Emojis.
The variety of gadgets to communicate has evolved to portable devices that echo our need to be mobile and have access to our records anywhere we are in the physical world. This has hugely made us depend on wifi availability, a resource which is controlled by only a few players. We can be held captive in this manner when speech and writing are no longer free to be transmitted instantaneously.
Each of us no longer has the thrill of having a private diary buried under a tree or in a secret drawer. Every part of our daily life is recorded by third parties and leaves a trail, even when we electronically delete it.
The shift from use of feathered quills to thumb pressing to write has only taken a few hundred years. It can be both exciting and frightening to imagine the future in this respect. Our records cannot be burned as they are no longer on paper. Yet they can be tampered with, misused and interfered by parties having covert negative intentions, as they can be traced much more easily than with paper documents.
The keyboard still survives but the desktop, email, laptop and tablet are all inevitably headed to oblivion. What is next?
Reflect at how our residential post boxes, email addresses, instant messaging folders and social media inboxes can be saddled with junk stuff and file attachments. There is this dire risk of not having ever being satisfied with whatever capacity is made available.
There may also be no need to write much in the future. We leave verbal messages on phone apps and can ask robots for verbalised answers.
Yet on the other hand, we do not need to speak on the phone as we can "chat" silently on provider websites that facilitate text conversation formats.
Analytics of our data and images in cyberspace can lead to a new form of political and social control.
Nothing good is free, we do realise there is a cost to be paid for the benefits of on line real time uploading of messages, photos and videos of what we are doing to anyone in another part of the world - provided both sender and recipient can pay for and have access to the new god of wifi.
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