twoplustwoequalsblog

I was a member of the high school class of 2006. My peers and I go to college in an age where vacation photos from Hawaii can be sent back to your friends in Europe before you even get on the plane home. We have little devices we carry around that let us call anyone from anywhere. Communication is absurdly easy.

Just a few years ago, heading off to college would have been completely different. Contact info between friends would have to be carefully coordinated to stay in touch during the months at school. Maybe you would make a long distance phone call now and then, or send a letter or two, but it was tough. You had to actually put effort into it to stay in contact.

So we have the technology: how do we use it? It seems that most people stay in only cursory contact through mediums like Facebook. “lol I like your pic” really isn’t the same as sitting down with someone over dinner and talking about the mutual challenges and excitements you are finding at college. This is partially why I set up Major Distraction. Writing a letter with a pen and paper is a lot more authentic form of communication than trading one liners back and forth on the internet. With all the power of communication at our fingertips, all we do is use it to have more people that we take for granted.

Wouldn’t seeing people be much more exciting if it took you a month of trading letters back and forth to set up a meeting time and place? Imagine the thrill of breaking your routine to meet friends you haven’t seen (and thus talked to) in months passing through town. Facebook tells me I have 358 ‘friends’. How many of them would I go out of my way to see?

The too-much-information age.