The E-mail Mailman

I got an accusatory phone call from my grandma about two weeks ago. I answered the phone with a simple “Hello?” and was greeted with the shrill response, “Why haven’t you answered your Granny Annie’s five e-mails?” I knew I hadn’t received any of her e-mails, but she was insistent upon the fact that she sent them exactly the way I had taught her when she got her first computer a few months ago. After reviewing the exact steps she took, I finally realized she had been adding a letter to the end of my e-mail address. I explained that that was why I hadn’t been getting her e-mails and she scoffed on the phone, “Well, that’s close enough—the mailman should’ve been able to catch that!”

All of these new technologies, iPhones, PDAS, and their subsequent power, as shown in the reading about smart mobs, is overwhelming and surprising at times, even to astute technological navigators, let alone those of an older generation. E-mail is just about as far as I’ll push my grandma technologically—I fear explaining Facebook, MySpace, podcasts, or simply texting and the accompanying new definitions of “communities” and “friends” would, to her, just seem implausible and more importantly, unnecessary.

These new communities have definitely altered the average teen/college student’s daily life. I think one of the areas most affected by these communities is the emergence of students who are antisocial in physical, real-world communities, but very social in online communities. They know the profiles of everybody in their World of Warcraft network and all of their MySpace friends, yet remain secluded from real communities because of all of their time devoted to online activities. This irony of being antisocial in order to become social online, is a common phenomenon in dorm rooms. Everybody knew those few kids in their dorms who holed up in their rooms on their computers or Xbox’s practically all day. The problem I think this is creating for many of our “technologically advanced” generation is a lack of real physical interactions. Dumping a girlfriend or boyfriend by text or IM, while not socially respectable is becoming more and more common. People can listen to all of their lectures online via podcasts without ever showing up to class and interacting with their classmates. The ways these new communities and technologies manifest to our detriment in our daily lives is astounding. Don’t get me wrong--I don’t think we should just ignore all of these new developments, that would be, as cliché as it sounds, “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” I do think, however, that as students, and technological junkies, we need to be more discerning in our uses for these new developments and emphasize more personal, face-to-face interactions so we can continue to interact with different generations and be seen as socially astute in all media.