Today’s tools increasingly highlight the growing generational divide in the worlds of communication. Instant messaging and text messaging are new forces mainly to those of us in the older generations. Their use by today’s teens has been around since they were children, and for the young, a few years are an eternity. Their present methods of meeting and speaking via these technological means are only the extensions of communication they had already learned.
Technology may be created mainly by adults. But, children and teens are the ones who use it, steer it, and ultimately manifest its full potential.
Those external to this aspect of technological development may decide to see it only as outsiders. Many adults have already formed the methods by which they weave their social fabric. It is difficult to understand another method for those whose templates of world view have already been shaped.
When, for example, criminals and the cruel attack via these new portals of communication, outsiders are left confused – stretched between the alien times from which they came and the love of their children. In a frenzy of fear, the medium may be implicated rather than the propensities of Mankind.
Regardless of the medium, it is still emotion that drives. It is still the desires between connection and independence that look for methods of titration. It is still avoiding pain. It is still love sought.
Personally, I like voice. Its inflections and intonations, its sounds carry an eon of development from an age of only music through times of enunciation and finally formations of words and paragraphs. But, I am also certain that a richness of experience exists in the constantly birthing newer worlds of technology. If such capacity for life did not exist, the young would likely not be migrating there.
It would be difficult to believe that the strength in the subtleties and depth of Soul could be marred or hindered by the tools with which we surround ourselves. It is still us who seek connection and do so via the communication methods at hand to create the detailed expressions and experiences of life.
Some may not yet understand the ebbs and flows in these new worlds created by technology’s influences on communication. Perhaps adults may never grasp it as fully as the youth. But that is still no excuse from learning these new languages, as accent-laden as this freshly learned speech may be.
Those with any age have the privileges and burdens of priceless stories and experiences of Life. Being more strangers than the young to this quickly shifting strange new land, there is a risk of falling into obsolescence. The duty to our society falls to continued learning of these new worlds if we wish those experiences to be heard.
