We live in a world
where everyone is just a Ping away, wishing birthdays means writing on their
facebook wall and if you hate something, tweet it! One update and everyone gets
to know where you are, what you are up to and everything going on in your life.
Friendship seems a request away; relationships just mean changing your status;
break-ups and fights happen by blocking each other from every way possible how
someone can reach you and one offensive comment, someone’s about to unfriend
you!
We have come far
ahead in the terms of communication; from the time when only way to talk was
when you met someone coincidentally or by choice to distant telephone calls and
now, where everyone is glued to each other’s life. Decades back we would have
dreamt about it but is this really what we expected? Where is the time where
love was expressed by writing those adorable love letters, cute gestures and
mushy things you did for each other, when friendship meant to stay by someone’s
side till the end no matter what and problems were not updated, but solved?
On the bright side,
we are constantly connected to one other through social networking apps and
websites. Communication has become easier and webcam chat via Skype with your
family staying miles apart is indeed bliss. These new ways to stay in touch,
who would have thought of it then! Technology has been amusing us by coming up
with something new every day. Everybody seems a text or phone call away. It hardly
takes split seconds to know what’s going on around the world and everything is
just a click away. Updating statuses, uploading pictures, sharing videos and
links, browsing, sending emails; all thanks to the internet.
Yes, technology is
indeed a blessing but hasn’t it become a hindrance in the mode of
communication. Call it the advancement or changing generation, communication
has lost its essence today. Those hours we spent talking on the phone have
reduced to text messages and nowadays, online messengers. Letters to emails to
the casual conversations; it is all so different. Communication has become an
irony in itself. In the race of bettering the mode, its meaning is somewhere
lost. People are just obsessed with more comments on their photos and statues
and just let more people know about their life. Making friends has become so
quick that we meet new people every day and slowly forget the old ones.
Likewise, we have
forgotten the old ways of interacting. Those awkward moments when you meet
someone for the first time, writing letters to each other, unending phone calls
and moreover, meeting without thinking of phones. The new technology has surely
made it instant but do we need all this? Our phones seem to get smarter than
the humans. People updating every little thing they do during the day, pictures
of every damn event and it seems like; we just wish to rank ourselves on a
higher scale of socialising. But in this pursuit of befriending the world, we
are losing the few who meant the world to us. Earlier, old photographs were
kept and shared only with the closed ones spending hours with those unforgettable
memories and now; click a picture, upload it and spend hours commenting over
it. How times have changed!
Every generation has certain
ideology, forced beliefs, paradigms and various complaints from the next
generation. Things change, time changes and we manage to change with time. We might
have adjusted ourselves to this new way of interacting and keeping in touch 24*7,
but as they always say; “Old is Gold”. I still crave for the old times to come
back which is never going to happen. I would genuinely thank the ancient
civilization of letter writing and Alexander Graham Bell for telephones. These mediums
might seem clichéd but you gave us the most beautiful ways to communicate which
at least our generation can never forget!
