A Manifesto for a World of Personal People
So, as I was writing my NCTE thing, I realized I needed to share it with other people. So here I am, sharing.
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Impersonality has sadly become the norm of the world today. With all the millions upon millions of e-mails, text messages, Tweets, and status updates flying across the world each day on tiny electrical signals, people have become paradoxically disconnected from each other. After all, when all you have to do to find out what’s going on in the world is turn on your computer each morning, why bother to actually spend the time and effort of actually getting to know anyone else? In cities of millions, how can one being be seriously expected to care about the multitude around them? People are rude and mean to each other as a matter of course, and a polite word is the exception rather than the rule in the modern world. We have been trained to know that emotion and personal respect does not transfer well over the great and powerful internet, whose primary language is sarcasm. Eventually, our own personalities fall by the wayside as we wonder how best to describe our lives in 144 words, and we become just another line of text on everybody else’s home page. Technology, in the name of progress, is slowly conquering our lives and our relationships to others, and only we, the John Q. Publics of the world, can halt that conquest. We can not rely on our neighbors to break out of the Facebook model of interpersonal relationships and come get to know us, because they are waiting for us to do precisely the same thing. So how do we begin to become personable people once again? What do we have to do to put other people back into out lives in the spots where machines have taken over? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. The very nature of personality is uniqueness, and everyone must come to grips with themselves and others in their own way. You can start, though, by simply unplugging yourself from the comforting shackles of modern technology.
By no means should this be taken as an invitation to burn your computer and smash your phone. Technology is great, and it can be used for good purposes. If not for computers, these very words would likely be written an illegible scrawl that barely passes for handwriting. The fact remains that over-reliance on technology is the root cause of the problem of impersonality that faces our society today. So turn off your computer for a day. Turn off your cell phone, too, and your X-box or your PS3. You won’t die, I promise. When you inevitably start to get bored and wonder what to do a minute into this experiment, take down a book from the shelf and read it. Cover to cover, if you can. Then, go outside and take a walk around your neighborhood. Wave to your neighbors. Pick up trash along the side of the road. Take the time to shoot the breeze with anyone who stops to talk to you. If you get lonely, don’t just text your best friend, call them. Or better yet, stop by for a visit. Whatever you can think of to do in a world as vast as ours is, do it, even if all it is is some cheesy activity you remember from your favorite sitcom. Sitcoms are all about the way people interact with each other, so they usually know their stuff.
When you’re done with all that, don’t expect to not feel the urge to immediately jump back onto the computer and IM your buddies. This is not magic, and you can’t expect miracles. You can, however, expect to have new ideas and new thoughts from your experiences. Now comes the crafty bit. Now you use technology to your advantage. The very next time you log on to your computer after you’ve spent some time unplugged, share what you felt, in detail. Long, winding, excruciating detail. Write a huge post about it on your blog, or your Facebook page, or your Livejournal account, or whatever your preferred social networking medium is, so long as you get it out there. Even if you think no-one is going to read it because it blow well past the five second attention span of the internet, put it out there anyway, and while you’re at it, tag a group of people you think might be willing or needing to hear your message. If even one person, stuck in the curt aggravation of the modern world, reads what you wrote and takes it to heart, you’ve succeeded. With any luck, they’ll decide to take your words and run with them, to take what you said in their own direction, and they’ll become one more person in what will hopefully be an ever growing world of people. Not just email addresses and log-ins, but actual people.
Meanwhile, you keep right on exploring that world. Spend more time unplugged. Let the person who showed you and welcomed you into this world of people know what they’ve done for you, and form a connection with them. Get to know what they like to do, and then get to know what you like to do. Find out more about yourself, and then tell people what you find. When someone else opens up to you and bears their soul, listen and care. Slowly, you will find yourself less reliant on digital machines and more reliant on flesh and blood for your support and satisfaction. You will find you don’t have to get to know every one of the one million people you will bump into in your daily life, you only really need to get to know one, and that one will lead to another, and another, one at a time. Then you will have at last become a personal person, and the world will be a better and richer place for it. It will be a place of people once again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Impersonality has sadly become the norm of the world today. With all the millions upon millions of e-mails, text messages, Tweets, and status updates flying across the world each day on tiny electrical signals, people have become paradoxically disconnected from each other. After all, when all you have to do to find out what’s going on in the world is turn on your computer each morning, why bother to actually spend the time and effort of actually getting to know anyone else? In cities of millions, how can one being be seriously expected to care about the multitude around them? People are rude and mean to each other as a matter of course, and a polite word is the exception rather than the rule in the modern world. We have been trained to know that emotion and personal respect does not transfer well over the great and powerful internet, whose primary language is sarcasm. Eventually, our own personalities fall by the wayside as we wonder how best to describe our lives in 144 words, and we become just another line of text on everybody else’s home page. Technology, in the name of progress, is slowly conquering our lives and our relationships to others, and only we, the John Q. Publics of the world, can halt that conquest. We can not rely on our neighbors to break out of the Facebook model of interpersonal relationships and come get to know us, because they are waiting for us to do precisely the same thing. So how do we begin to become personable people once again? What do we have to do to put other people back into out lives in the spots where machines have taken over? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. The very nature of personality is uniqueness, and everyone must come to grips with themselves and others in their own way. You can start, though, by simply unplugging yourself from the comforting shackles of modern technology.
By no means should this be taken as an invitation to burn your computer and smash your phone. Technology is great, and it can be used for good purposes. If not for computers, these very words would likely be written an illegible scrawl that barely passes for handwriting. The fact remains that over-reliance on technology is the root cause of the problem of impersonality that faces our society today. So turn off your computer for a day. Turn off your cell phone, too, and your X-box or your PS3. You won’t die, I promise. When you inevitably start to get bored and wonder what to do a minute into this experiment, take down a book from the shelf and read it. Cover to cover, if you can. Then, go outside and take a walk around your neighborhood. Wave to your neighbors. Pick up trash along the side of the road. Take the time to shoot the breeze with anyone who stops to talk to you. If you get lonely, don’t just text your best friend, call them. Or better yet, stop by for a visit. Whatever you can think of to do in a world as vast as ours is, do it, even if all it is is some cheesy activity you remember from your favorite sitcom. Sitcoms are all about the way people interact with each other, so they usually know their stuff.
When you’re done with all that, don’t expect to not feel the urge to immediately jump back onto the computer and IM your buddies. This is not magic, and you can’t expect miracles. You can, however, expect to have new ideas and new thoughts from your experiences. Now comes the crafty bit. Now you use technology to your advantage. The very next time you log on to your computer after you’ve spent some time unplugged, share what you felt, in detail. Long, winding, excruciating detail. Write a huge post about it on your blog, or your Facebook page, or your Livejournal account, or whatever your preferred social networking medium is, so long as you get it out there. Even if you think no-one is going to read it because it blow well past the five second attention span of the internet, put it out there anyway, and while you’re at it, tag a group of people you think might be willing or needing to hear your message. If even one person, stuck in the curt aggravation of the modern world, reads what you wrote and takes it to heart, you’ve succeeded. With any luck, they’ll decide to take your words and run with them, to take what you said in their own direction, and they’ll become one more person in what will hopefully be an ever growing world of people. Not just email addresses and log-ins, but actual people.
Meanwhile, you keep right on exploring that world. Spend more time unplugged. Let the person who showed you and welcomed you into this world of people know what they’ve done for you, and form a connection with them. Get to know what they like to do, and then get to know what you like to do. Find out more about yourself, and then tell people what you find. When someone else opens up to you and bears their soul, listen and care. Slowly, you will find yourself less reliant on digital machines and more reliant on flesh and blood for your support and satisfaction. You will find you don’t have to get to know every one of the one million people you will bump into in your daily life, you only really need to get to know one, and that one will lead to another, and another, one at a time. Then you will have at last become a personal person, and the world will be a better and richer place for it. It will be a place of people once again.