Communication. Communication in key. For anything in life.
I grew up in the small town of Jaffray, British Columbia. A town where everyone knew everybody and everything that was happening.
There was always the latest gossip, or people talking to each other about everything and anything that was going on.
It was nice, I almost always knew where my little brother was, or what my friends were doing.
It was a simpler time.
If someone was falling on a hard time, or something happened to someone you knew or loved dearly, you would find out through face to face interaction, or sometimes over the phone, where they would make sure you weren’t alone if they had something to tell you.
You were never truly alone when finding out information.
Now, we live in a time were communication isn’t always necessarily a face to face interaction.
It’s someone writing on Facebook, or sending a tweet on Twitter, or posting a photo on Instagram. We lose human touch and connection because of this.
People will post on Facebook just simple statuses stating something, whether it be big or little news. It still gets posted.
People will send out tweets in in rage when things happen. I know I’ve done this one personally, even recently due to certain circumstances and events.
Or you find out someone you know has a new boyfriend/girlfriend through a simple photo on Instagram… Even if you thought that person was your best friend.
Social medias are becoming the end of communication as we know it.
Albeit, I’m not the best one for talking to people face to face, especially if I have a problem.
I’ll put it the best I can, with recent events that have happened in my life, I have honestly never felt more alone. Things happened that were beyond my control, and I had one of my best friends shut me out of her life for a few days, because she wasn’t having the best of time either.
The only way that I was able to reach her was a somewhat hostile/directly made tweet about what was going on.
This was one of the only ways that I was able to reach my best friend.
Not by talking to her face.
Tweeting something for her to see.
And I am one that loathes finding out things on social media.
It’s happened to me multiple times in my life. Recently this year, and in the past when I lost my aunty.
I found out that by a simple Facebook post.
Yes, my family has poor communications skills, but when friends and strangers find out something before the family, there’s an issue.
That’s how the world turns. We don’t pick up the phone and talk to people. We text them, we message on Facebook… We tweet in hopes that they see.
That’s where the world is going.
Instead of trying to actually meet up with someone face to face, we’ll FaceTime them, Skype them.
We lose human contact.
I will admit I love FaceTime to some degree. My family is spread out across the world, and I rarely get to see them. We FaceTime to talk, and it’s one of the few ways that we can stay connected.
FaceTime is almost the closest thing that people will get to to picking up a phone and dialing a number to speak to someone.
We’ve resorted to lol’s, nm u?, and slang of all sorts.
We’re losing communications and we’re losing our language.
Kids don’t care as much about spelling and grammar anymore, almost any word/document software that you buy will fix your spelling and grammar mistakes, where you just mindlessly click a button that reads agree or disagree.
We don’t teach kids to read nearly as much, since there’s “an app for that” or a podcast, or a YouTube video.
There’s always something else.
I grew up reading every night, usually for an hour or so. This stemmed from my parents and siblings reading to me from when I was born, to me now reading to my two-year old nephew.
Yet there are people that don’t value language and the written word as much as others.
If we keep up like this then we’re going to lose our language almost completely.
Yes, it’s still spoken, but will anyone truly care about how we write out?
You don’t want to read a book? Don’t worry, some big celebrity has recorded it and you can buy it off of iTunes.
Why? Because why communicate.
Book clubs are a dying breed. I love to read, and thankfully so do my sisters. Every couple of months or so we’ll exchange some books with each other and hold conversations about what we’ve read or learned.
Kids these days talk about what stupid stunt someone has done in a video that’s plastered across the web.
As a society we don’t value learning nearly as much as we used to. There’s how to videos on almost every single thing. We don’t learn from our parents on how to cook or plant anything.
We rely on someone posting a how-to video on simple things. I’m surprised that I haven’t come across a video labeled “how to boil water- the ten-step process”. It’s simple and can be done in less than that, but we need reassurance as a person to make sure that it is done one-hundred per cent correct.
Gone are the days of going to your grandparents to play board games or see cousins.
People are too busy with their lives to realize that everything is happening rapidly around them and that you don’t always have that time like you did before to see the ones you love.
Next time someone says let’s meet up for coffee, or do you want to go for a drive?
Take that chance. Value what other people have to say.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say in again. Communication is key.
Listen to learn… Don’t listen to respond.
