Nostalgia Of The Young:
What is Nostalgia? Nostalgia is best described as a memory or long for the past, reminding the individual of an event or something that occurred in their life. Nostalgia includes emotion on both ends of the spectrum like happiness and sadness. If Nostalgia was a taste it would be a lemon pie, tart with an underlying sweetness. It is with this emotion of Nostalgia that we greet the new technologies that we are confronted with daily.
Gone are the days where you pick up a phone, call a friend, and talk for hours. Our lives do not fit this concept. We are too busy to spend this much time “communicating”. Instead, we must be satisfied with simply connecting with as many people as we can. Is it any wonder that people look at the past with Nostalgia? How many of us experience communication that expresses emotion to each other in meaningful ways?
Should we actually be settling for texts that communicate the important details of our lives? Is it appropriate for a spouse to communicate to her significant other that she is pregnant. Is it more important to be practical as well as personal to ask your partner to marry you in a text message? Is all communication supposed to be quick abrupt and impersonal. What does this do to us as people? Are we relegating emotions as something that belongs in the past in order to keep up with digital world technology? Our new technologies change daily. We as a generation are becoming technology junkies and we are missing communication techniques that our mothers and fathers employed. Should this bother us? I think that it should. I believe that we can have both the digital world of technology along with excellent communication skills. I do not think that it is necessary to put our entire lives on Facebook. I also feel that good communication begins with trust. We have the best tools to communicate with than any generation thus far and yet I fear that we are abusing them. You very rarely see an individual under the age of 25 without a phone, tablet, iPod, or laptop with them. How many times have you been in a coffee shop, seen two people together, and yet they are texting someone else on the phone. What happened to the basic rules of good interpersonal communication? How can you be a good listener if you are more interested in answering the last text that talking to the person that you are with? How can we bond with who we most want to be with if when we are with them we are texting someone else? When we fail to make a personal connection with other people with new technology we have the ability to join a fantasy reality like “Second Life”. In virtual realities like second life we can communicate on a personal level with other people who want to pretend to be someone other than they are rather that actually working to become the person that they really would like to be. As a generation I feel that we have lost the much of the human bonding that we as a species need for positive mental health.
In my opinion digital technically advanced technology has flooded our lives and given us a different set of rules and expectations of others. Unfortunately the rule book is a secret and we are floundering attempting to find our when our human side fits with our technological side. Facebook, twitter, dating sites, and sites for true confessions have given people a new way of communicating and dealing with the emotions and pressures of today but how much of our technology helps us work though our problems and how much does our technology actually help us avoid our problems.
Our country has been faced with multiple tragedies involving shootings in schools and other public places by individuals who are mentally unbalanced. Our answer to restricting these incidents would be to control the access of guns in our cities in states. I do not feel that this is the only answer to this very serious problem. As a nation I think that we have to pay attention to the way that we are communicating with each other. A virtual reality site would be psychologically devastating to person who is not reality based. The virtual reality war games can have a pathological effect on someone with violent tendencies. For unstable individuals, to suggest that it is ok to kill thousands of people in a video game, how big of a stretch is it to suggest its ok to kill groups of people in a movie theater, mall or school. Are video games, virtual reality games, true confession sites, Facebook and twitter bad? I don’t think so but I think that they have done additional psychological damage to the psychologically impaired. Technology has changed so quickly that there has not been enough time to evaluate the positive and negative effects of it.
Attention to each other is what we are lacking as our dependence on technology increases. Young teens can multitask texting while they are doing other things but they are losing the ability to focus when asked to attend to a new concept or skill. I have experienced the results of broken relationships due to too much dependence on technology and not enough attention on interpersonal skills.
Finally, technological advances are wonderful but we are allowing these advances to control us. We should not throw away what we have learned from interpersonal contact. It is rude to text while the person that you are with is sitting across from you expecting conversation. It is insensitive to place personal information about another person on the internet without discussing it with them first. It is alright to let someone hear your voice when you want to tell them you love them, and if you do something to offend a friend it is better to tell them you are sorry than text them an apology.
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