27. Tomorrow Never Dies

I really like Ta-Nehisi Coates. And someday I would very much like to have his job. He's a pretty earnest guy who knows a fair bit about a fair bit and is unusually honest about what he doesn't know. So he makes for a pretty good cultural commentator.

A recent post got me to thinking about my obsession with the written word and my deathly fear that all the texting/chatting/Facebooking we do is killing it slowly. There are those who insist that "there are no good old days." And then there are those of us who are sure that just because things were never perfect doesn't mean they were never better.

If we can imagine human society advancing in real ways, why the inability to imagine it declining? What is there to say about a society in which the sum of thousands of years of agricultural technology expands the scope of the human diet from a few durable crops to a few hundreds crops, only to see that same technology mix with economics to restrict our diets back down to a few crops (corn, soy and potatoes) in a matter of 20 years? And what does it mean that in a society where literacy has expanded with each successive generation, because of computers a good many "highly educated" persons cannot legibly write the English alphabet?

Is it so obviously untrue that a generation of young people who cannot carry a decent phone conversation because they grew up texting is socially handicapped in some way? I remember when Facebook status updates were automatically formatted to begin with "is." I became so adapted to writing them that I (and some other people I know) found myself instinctively thinking in terms of "is" statements. There has to be something worth exploring about that.

For my part, I do think that a world of virtual connectivity, where we spend infinitely more time looking at each others' screen names than we do each others' faces, is worrisome. Technology isn't a bad thing. I love that I can be in Maryland in under 2 hours or across the Atlantic in 12. The problem for me is that we seem more and more to believe that we don't need to actually cross the Atlantic when we can just sign onto GChat and talk to the person on the other side. Virtual life is great for all those times when you can't access the real thing. But when we stop trying for the real thing, when we stop believing that there's any difference between the two, I think we've taken some serious steps back as a society.

I'm a little extreme on this point. I acknowledge that. I like to see my friends' faces. I like to hear their voices and climb in the passenger seats of their cars. I like to do all the things I'll wish I could do again when my time here comes to an end. And when that time comes, I cannot imagine that I'll ever find myself wishing I could sign onto GChat just one more time.