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Originally Posted by Master_Shake
I admit I never sat outside on the porch sipping lemonade, but how thrilling were those conversations really?
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Speaking from experience, those conversations were just as engaging and personally I believe they were MORE engaging than any electronically created conversation that we hold here on TFP.
I grew up pretty much without a television. My parents owned several televisions off and on as I was growing up but rarely watched much on them and any time my brother or I began to whine about wanting to watch more television they threw the TV out. LITERALLY. I would say we probably owned a TV for about 3 years total while I grew up. We spent MANY days and evenings sitting on our porch, chatting with neighbors who walked by. I spent my days playing kick the can, capture the flag, tag, or wandering the woods and nearby creek with my best friend. Or I spent my days painting the porch, mowing the lawn, or weeding the garden.
I think we as individuals are becoming more isolationists that our nation once was. People want to pull our military out of other countries and want to hide in their homes. They don't want anyone else to know what's going on in their lives saying that it's a violation of privacy for other's to know this. There is no neighborhood raising our kids. We're left to do that by ourselves more and more. We don't want our neighbors and friends to have any say about our kids because that's a violation of our parenting rights. We pull away from our families by watching TV and (I must claim personal guit here) interacting on the telephone and computer. We've lost the personal human physical touch. That physical element is what makes us collectively cold.
I think because we've lost that physcal element in our daily interactions we become afraid of personal contact as in that woman who fled to her car instead of accept help from another unknown human on the road. We're unaccoustomed to any human interaction that's not based on BUSINESS. We go to the store and pay a cashier - not a human, we got to work and do the bidding of a boss - not a human. We're depersonalizing the people around us and reacting to them as though they are imaginary beings on a television and on the computer.
Technology is a wonderful thing. It has given us advances in medicine and made it possible for homebound persons to even operate a business or interact in a small way with other "electronic" humans. It has increased the speed of communication.
In the end, We need to be careful not to accept technology and media as a replacement for physical human interaction.