Welcome back my avid followers to another pilgrimage of discovery through my mind. These posts are starting to become collector’s items as the time and inspiration to write them has dwindled somewhat over the past year. I still enjoy setting aside moments in my day to ponder recent activities and events but getting them on my increasingly frustrating laptop is a chore at best. I can’t promise that the glory days of weekly posts will return but at least this will ease the pressure on me thrust by certain quarters. Let’s just enjoy the limited time we spend together and take it for what it is – just a little bit of satirical fun straight from my head. Have you all got your hot beverages and tasty snacks? If so let’s begin. In this post I will address the evolution of social behaviour and the many ways in which we communicate in these confusing times…
Let me take you back to when I was a wee nipper running around, pulling limbs from daddy long-legs, eating soil from the buffet tray that was my back garden and actively imagining myself in the role of Flash Gordon fighting my teddy who took on the role of the evil "Ming the Merciless". I miss those days where you could fit into pedal cars and ride your bike all day without fatigue. It was a much simpler existence. Back then the television was a privilege with only four channels, computers took a fortnight to load and CD’s were just a pipe dream. In those days the only way to communicate to people was to actually talk to them face to face. Well, that and to attach a message to a trained pigeon’s foot. This system seemed to be more reliable than the postal service. Many people had telephones connected to the switch board; this system was used to talk to people in remote places. We didn’t have a landline phone for much of my childhood, but soon moved with the times and got one just as I was developing friendships at school. The only problem was that because this system was abused by my two older sisters too many times, our mother put a call barring code on the phone. Back to using yoghurt pots and string then.
As Bob Dylan famously sang “the times they are a changing.” No truer words were bleated than with technology and the way we communicate. The invention of the internet has revolutionised our day-to-day lives. Software is being developed as we speak making the stuff we use now almost useless in two to three years time. That to me is staggering. If you want to talk to someone in Bangladesh there are more ways to do it than ever. To name but a few – text, phone, email, internet chat rooms, social networking sites, face time, letter, telegram, Morse code, fax…the list goes on. I discovered a webcam site earlier this week. I don’t own a webcam and probably won’t ever buy one but I checked it out and all it seems to be is grown men masturbating down the camera at unsuspecting people. I don’t think that particular site is for me. I will inbox you the site if you are interested. There are lots of new phrases and terms used in texting and emailing. Terms like LOL and LMFAO, are constantly used in these forms of communication. I use them quite a lot myself in order to infiltrate this new adopted digital language.
The Queen’s English is dying a slow and painful death in the urban areas of our green and pleasant land. Words like “bruv” are replacing the timeless classic “geezer.” This saddens me when I walk into a pub and order a pint of lager and bacon fries, turn around and see two youthful looking boys with their hoods up playing on the fruit machine saying words like “sick” and “cuz.” I don’t think it is much of an adjustment for us to move along with these new urban phrases. Most teenagers just grunt at you when you attempt any basic form of communication so to hear anything is surely a blessing. I do think that the many ways in which we communicate has stunted our social skills somewhat though. People are choosing to interact with each other without leaving their own bedrooms, mainly due to the ease and quickness of the way things are mediated. Instant messaging and texting are now more convenient than vocal chords and body language. This saddens me in a way, especially now that complete fruitcakes can seem relatively normal in a chat room but if you saw them in the street you would make a conscious effort to avoid them.
Even map reading skills are a thing of the past now thanks to sat-navs and route planners. Smart phones have these applications on them as standard these days. I’m not saying that my map reading skills are exemplary but I find geography fascinating and love knowing capital cities and names of rivers, mountain ranges, landmarks etc. It is a shame that some don’t give a shit about what the capital of Norway is or what river runs through Paris. I have met people who didn’t realise that Canada was a separate country to USA. That isn’t just ignorance to geography, that is just plain ignorance. I have done it again, moved off on a tangent and I really don’t want to read back to see where the original subject changed so I will leave it there for now. Thanks for reading…
