The age of communication

We live in a world of continuous and constant communication. We blog our thoughts in detail; we tweet our thought-bites; we text, we post and podcast, we you-tube, we comment and like (and sometimes even super-like), we share, we +1, we what's-app.... We express, we show, we seek, we vent... in short, we manifest ourselves digitally in every which way possible.

It is our tendency to think that the technology pervades every little aspect of our life. The tone here is slightly defensive. It is the tone of a parent who has raised a prodigious child and who is now grudgingly accepting the fact while being a bit abashed about it, too. But this popular perspective is perhaps a bit biased. It is like we are looking at the transgressions of our own child, but at the same time, we are overlooking our own particular way to handle the situation. By letting the communication technology pervade our every breathing moment, we are not succumbing to the great force, rather it is our way to assimilate it. What we perceive to be the offensive presence of the monster is actually our attempt to tame the same wild monster. The ever-growing presence of technology in our life should not be treated as something pathological. We tend to think about it as something threatening to our core human values, but, may be, it would do us better justice to perceive the same threatening aspect as the potency of this tool. After all, the way to fight an inevitable tide is not to 'fight' it in the conventional sense, rather, to contain it, to engulf it. We are more likely to dissipate the wild nature of this monster not by shunning it, but by embracing it wholeheartedly. Such a change in the attitude may help us prevent these inventions from being invasions.

Our constant grumbling about the invasive nature of ever-evolving communication tools is really not giving our indomitable human spirit its deserving due. For those of us who prefer to see everything as some sort of a competition (perhaps justifiably so), we could treat the whole human-technology interaction as a kind of a tussle between the Natural Human and the Synthetic Human. The human spirit has always fought to survive... sometimes it has fought back and sometimes, as is evident now, it has fought in. Furthermore, let us realise, the scorching pace of evolution in the synthetic world is not just continuous, but to our great amazement, it is highly contagious, too. More and more people are participating the social media, making their presence felt one way or the other. With the spread of this 'epidemic', we have an ever-growing variety of human minds applying and adapting themselves to this new envronment, thereby getting a better collective hold over the seemingly scary and inhospitable landscape. 

Still, we must not lose the sight of the bigger picture. Nicholas Carr once said, "We've come to confuse communication with the exchange of explicit information. What can't be turned into data loses its perceived value." Quite so. After all, communication does not have to be so vulgarly external and concrete. Granted it is a natural tendency to share our hopes and aspirations, our joys and our sorrows with fellow human beings, and yet, there comes a time, to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, when a man "passes the age of communication". There is a time in our life when we no longer want to share. We probably reach a point of stabilised catharsis, where we become incommunicado with the tangible, physical world and the only communication we seek is with the intangible, metaphysical self. And then, following the footsteps in the long tradition of great philosopher-hermits, we seek the deepest silence... The Age of Communication slowly transcends into the Age of Communion with the Great Wilderness.