I looked up from the safe little world I was momentarily ensconced in long enough to take a count. I counted each person present in my group, my eyes moving around the small space as I silently spoke numbers to myself. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. There were five of us. We gathered in this place to wait for a few others to join us before we moved on to the next place on our list. As we sat and stood there I noticed how quiet it was between the five of us and noted how it had been this quiet for several minutes. Before looking back down at my phone, I took a more deliberate inventory. Again, my eyes moved from one person to another and I observed that all five of us, me included, held some electronic device in a hand, attention diverted, eyes gazing down onto some screen absorbed, captivated, lost, in a sea of pixels.
I had just sent a text message. Unsure exactly what the others were doing, I imagined one in our group was posting something on Facebook, another looking up directions, another playing a game and still another reading a book.
Five of us. Not one word.
Maybe it had been a long day. Maybe we were all tired of one another. Maybe we were all bored and looking for something to do. Maybe all of us had have rather been somewhere else with anyone else at that very moment. Maybe all of the above.
There was though no maybe about the quiet. Five of us. No words. Yet we were all occupied with something but none of it with anyone else in our group.
For a moment, it crossed my mind that maybe, in this day of instant and global communication, we are losing the skill of actually talking with one another; even if that lost talk is the basic conversation that fills in the less significant spaces between the moments in life that really do matter.
Then again, I turned back to the gadget in my hand and thought about how it opens up so many things that are really incredible. Now I can communicate with so many people at any time from almost anywhere. If I want to look up a newspaper article from two weeks ago or two decades ago, I can do that from the palm of my hand. I can entertain myself with some game I first played on an Atari in 1981 while in the waiting room in my doctor’s office avoiding the same October 2004 issue of Golf Magazine that has been there for years. I can connect with friends from long ago over the web and hang on the details of their day-to-day lives like a previous generation did with The Edge of Night. I mean when you have all this, who really needs conversation?
And while all these things are great, they still miss that something special. Through today’s technological magic, I am able to peak in on the lives of my friends anytime from anywhere. But sometimes I find that being able to do that tricks me into believing I don’t really need to connect with them more than checking out their Facebook page or Twitter feed every other day. Doing that means I miss out on those conversations that sparkle with personality or that convey wry, dry, sidesplitting humor or that pack unhindered emotion, all unique things that just come across flat and lacking in a digital world. It’s hard to believe those things can be replicated in some app.
Finally, after waiting and waiting, the rest of our group appears. Of course, each of them is holding some sort of electronic device. After a moment, one of them speaks the first words our group has heard in minutes, “Let’s go.”
We all look up, acknowledging the command, and then follow each other out the door, staggering and slowed as each one of us continues to be immersed disappearing into our own little worlds we hold in each of our own little hands.
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