Communication Breakdown

By Jacob Betzner on September 16, 2012

My flight landed in Leipzig, a city in eastern Germany, in early June after more than 24 sleepless hours of travel.

“Now what?”  I thought to myself in the airport.

I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and blankly stared at the screen for a few moments.

“No Google Maps.  No texting.  No calling,” I thought as it all suddenly hit me.  “Now what?!”

With a little, okay, a lot of luck, I eventually found the correct train and my professor waiting for me at the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof (central train station) relying on an old fashioned sense of direction and the kindness of strangers.  No Googling directions, no calling my professor and asking for directions…actually talking to people and trusting my instincts.

It both shocked and bothered me how dependent I was on technology and how lost I was without it, how asking strangers for help seemed so daunting and holding a conversation with a fellow human being with a genuine interest in why I was visiting Germany seemed so foreign.

Ladies and gentlemen, what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

As thousands of US citizens prepared for the upcoming release of Apple’s latest innovation, the iPhone 5, forming lines outside Apple stores across the country, nerdier versions of the formations of tween and teenage girls waiting for the midnight release of the newest installment in the “Twilight” series, it became apparent how disturbingly addicted we are to technology.

From flikr, by davie_the_amazing

Technology is supposed to make communication easier, but in many ways it’s making communication more difficult, taking away to formality and frequency of a face-to-face conversation and replacing it with impersonal interactions with a computer or cell phone screen.  However,

technology isn’t all bad.  In fact, it can make things a lot easier.  I’m using technology to reach everyone who reads this article.

Apple is marketing the latest installment in the iPhone family as “thinner, lighter, faster and taller” with a higher resolution, an extra row of apps and some other minor upgrades.  All the more to suck you in and never let you out.

We live in a bubble.  That bubble becomes even smaller when we have our eyes glued to the screen of a smart phone or tablet instead of interacting with the actual people around us.

It’s nice to unplug every once in a while.  Turn off the iPhone, power down the laptop, put away the iPod, and simply take in your surroundings.  There’s a whole world out there that GoogleEarth and Twitter can’t replace.

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