The Great Disconnect?

"You can not be responsible for how clearly your message is received. Only for how clearly it is sent."

--Neale Donald Walsch

Very good, if brief, article in today's Globe on what the author terms the "great disconnect" that Facebook and the like have wrought.

Twenty years ago, if you couldn't meet face-to-face, you had two options for staying in touch. One was the postal system, now sneeringly dubbed "snail-mail". The other is still around, yet according to this article, increasingly shunned: the telephone.

Snail-mail is, of course, incredibly slow. A conversation by mail is pretty much out of the question: by the time you get an answer, you may not have forgotten the question, but like as not you've forgotten the emotional state you were in when you asked it. Yet books of letters qualify as Literature, with a capital L: the very laggardly nature of the postal system lends itself very well to deep, introspective communication.

I'd argue that telephones by nature foster disconnect. My thoughts on this are heavily influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest:

A traditional aural‐only conversation — utilizing a hand‐held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece -- rather significantly, it later seemed -- contained 62 or 36 little pinholes — let you enter a kind of highway‐hypnotic semi‐attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine‐groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone‐pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign‐language‐and‐exaggerated‐facial‐expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let’s say performed a close tactile blemish‐scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish‐scan. It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and

aurally supported: the phone‐line’s other end’s voice was dense, tightly

compressed, and vectored right into your ear, enabling you to imagine that the

voice’s owner’s attention was similarly compressed and focused . . . even though your own attention was not, was the thing. This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody’s complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.

There are times I hate the telephone. It has all the perils and few of the pleasures of a face-to-face conversation. Lacking body language cues, people talking on telephones can easily misinterpret each other. Worse, responses are required instantly: not always desirable, especially should your conversation develop into an argument.

Enter the next generations of communication tools: email, texting, and social media sites like Facebook.

EMAIL is increasingly rare today, probably for the same reasons "snail mail" is obsolete. It's too slow. I'm in that "tweener" generation that goggles at what I just wrote, but if you ask someone half my age, odds are that's what they'll tell you. Odds are also that they're bullshitting...but they may not know it.

It's not speed the yowwens are decrying: their beloved texting is no slower (and no faster) than an email. It's depth. Email, like snail mail before it, connotes a depth of communication to which increasingly few are willing to plunge. Email is slower than a text message only because it's generally longer. It requires more attention of the reader. A Twitter-feed or a text message--140 characters at most--can be read and digested in a single glance. I'm not sure how much shallower we can get...I'm only sure we'll soon find out.

Facebook counts among its denizens over half a billion people, including most (not quite all) of the people I care about. It's become my default communications tool. When Dad had his heart attacks two weeks ago and I was incommunicado, Eva very helpfully updated my Facebook status so that everyone would know where I was and that Dad was okay. No other tool I can think of would apprise so many people so easily.

Am I, as the article above suggests, a "narcissistic digital native" who expects "continuous connection", but who will "shut others off" when I "don't have the time or the will"? I'll address each allegation in turn.

NARCISSISTIC: enough of what I think about me. What do you think about me? No, seriously, any blogger completely devoid of narcissism won't remain a blogger for long. Yet I don't suffer the delusion that the world revolves around me. I like to think I can write, and that my writings will be read and appreciated...but I'd still write this blog if nobody read it.

EXPECTS CONTINUOUS CONNECTION? Please God, no. I demand connection on my time and terms. Maybe that says something even worse about me. I don't think so. Leave something in your Facebook status and I'll see it tonight, tomorrow or next week. I still don't often carry my cell, and in any event don't have voice mail on it: if you want to call me, the safest way is to call my landline and leave a message...which I will retrieve and attend to as soon as I can.

"SHUT OTHERS OFF WHEN I DON'T HAVE THE TIME OR THE WILL? Guilty as charged...and I hope each and every one of you out there is every bit as guilty as I am. It's nothing personal, and we all do it, don't we? Who here has never screened a call? Held off on answering a message of any kind?

All in all, while I appreciate that Facebook might promote a disconnect in some cases, I don't believe it does for me...