The Connected Life

I have recently found that the quality of my interactions with my friends and relatives has dropped. So I began thinking about that to figure out why this was so.
Its easier to blame someone else for our own failings, but I do admit that I have been less regular in keeping in touch, emailing or phoning.

But at the heart of it, I found one of the big culprits to be Facebook !
"How so ?" You wonder, and I'll tell you how.

To start with, my FB [ Facebook ] page is now choked with status updates from all and sundry. A lot of this is information I don't need, for instance :

* I know that P has just read an article about Aishwarya Rai's delivery in some online edition of a respectable business journal.

* I see that R is single and ready to mingle [ has begun publishing her recent bikini pics ]

* M has suddenly grown philosophical and is spouting quotes by the Dalai Lama. [ this from someone who I've seen snort Tequila, lemon and salt up his nose ]

* Y likes this comment : "Sab Politician Chor hai" on Anna Hazare's group page. [ yet has never voted. Not even for any Indie candidate. ]

* A has just watched 17 Youtube videos this morning. 14 of these were music videos.

* S is playing Farmville and wants to gift me a Tractor. His boss plays Angry Birds.


We feel we are connected [ some even update on-the-fly from their handheld devices ], but are we really ?

Where is the quality of interaction ? Where is the meaningful exchange ? Heres an observation written almost a 100 years ago, but as relevant now as it was back then.

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 ............It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half.
There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an under-world. And quite incalculable. How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses? ..........

...........and she thought: Ah God, what has man done to man?
What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have
reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellow-ship any more! It is just a nightmare.

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Excerpt from - From Lady Chatterley's Lover by D H Lawrence