We need to become human again and stop being Zombies
By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
According to the writer, and I can but concur, we rely and depend way too much on using the electronic (social) media and so no longer interact with one another on a real level.
This is a point that becomes very evident when one observes groups of young people. I have seen three young lads sitting on a park bench together but instead of talking to each other they were sending each other SMS messages. Sad world we live in.
I am certainly no Luddite – I know, I keep saying that – and I do use technology at lot including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Skype, plus forums, yahoo groups, etc. and I use email for most letter communications.
And that is what we must remember as to email: It is an electronic letter and not some chat program or messenger service in real time.
Too many people have lost, it would seem, the art of letter writing and use email in a way they would never use a letter. This is bad etiquette and we must relearn our ways.
With the recent – Mid-October 2011 – Blackberry outages it has been proven again that we seem to be unable to do anything without those media and services and feel, without them, extremely lost. Work stalls and, it would seem, even social life.
This outage, in my opinion, has also, once again, proven and shown, despite all the rhetoric and promises, the unreliability of “the cloud” and of cloud services.
When it comes to emails, and I will come back to this subject at another time, we do not treat it and thus our recipients right. Email is a letter in electronic form and should, thus, be formatted like any letter that you would pop into an envelope, place a stamp upon and put into the post.
As the Dubai journalist said: we must become humans and human again and must, and I would say almost relearn to, interact with one another in a proper way again. It is time to rethink how we do things.
Sure, those methods of communication are great and have made the world a smaller place and brought us closer together across the continents but the cannot replace proper interaction and emails must become proper letter again even though they are sent electronically. That also means that one does not send another email a few hours later asking why there has been no reply as yet, etc.
Let's become humans again and let's stop being Zombies!
© 2011
