Picture a bar. A long wooden counter worn smooth like a river bottom by the passage of drinks and elbows and tabs. An audience of bottles behind it hug a mirror and peer out so that the alcoholics reflected in it can still pretend to be "social drinkers." There are stools and tables and chairs, maybe even some booths tucked away in the recesses of hushed conversation. In this bar are people, talking and drinking and more and more frequently pausing to bathe their faces in the alluring glow of their cell-phone screens. Real-time conversations are put on hold as people check out Facebook, check-in on Foursquare, and answer messages in the abbreviated and aggressively inarticulate vernacular of texts. In an increasingly popular and creatively barren sub-set of the English language, people are trading writing and now it seems social skills for LOL. This rise of immediacy has heralded the death of eloquence, and, perhaps more troubling is the apparent literal translation of networking. "Let's all go out to a bar and text other people." I don't understand it.
Even here at a conference for communicators, people who should be clinging to the last vestiges of decent conversation, find themselves all too willing to retreat quietly into a 4G cocoon. @johnathanswift would have had a field-day but satire requires more than 140 characters.
- 1stLt Nick Mercurio
Now I feel convicted for perusing Craigslist, topping off an EBay auction, taking my turn at WordsWithFriends and checking on someone who'd been in the bathroom for a while at Swig...to be fair though I'm still on 3G.
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