A Call to Communicate
If I were to start a revolution today, it would be for a return to practicing face-to-face human communication. Being a student of the field and having worked as a high school teacher, I am amazed at how increasingly difficult it is becoming for most of today’s youth to be able to talk face-to-face with each other. True, the information age has given us such gifts as cellphones with multiple avenues of communication (text, BBM, calls, etc.) and the Internet in order to eliminate the factor of distance, but at the price of people nowadays, particularly the youth, missing out on the many psychological nuances that still make face-to-face communication the most effective form.
This call may seem to some nothing more than a romantic notion, but it is much more than that. Depression and suicide, particularly of the teenage sort, are becoming a bigger and bigger problem in our societies. This is worsened by the convenience of using technology in order to withdraw from having to express emotions, which accumulate and eventually explode from a person in a variety of manifestations. Today’s youth may be comfortable in the anonymity the Internet provides, but what havoc will such activity wreak on one’s self-esteem in the future? Worst of all, though, is the fact that it is becoming more and more normal for us to see a child walking with his parents in a mall, but with his eyes glued to his PSP/iPad, unmindful of the world around him.
Left Hand, Write Hand 