What I have penned down in this veritable ‘monologue’ started with an attempt to wish a close friend via a long-distance phone call on her birthday, which went unanswered. This is not the first time this would have happened to many of us.
Immediately following this, I resorted to WhatsApp, and sent her a ready-made birthday card downloaded from the internet, and to make it a bit more personal, I added a few lines of my own. She acknowledged similarly with a number of emojis and few written words, and that ended our ‘transaction’ (if I may call it so since birthday wishes would tend to be reciprocal), a mechanical, mostly impersonal and emotionally insignificant endeavour.
My husband who was next to me and after listening to my lamentation on our dependency on digital ‘writing’ and its lack of intimacy, immediately responded with the words, ‘hey…sometimes it might be tiring to talk’. For him, who has a major dislike for talking on phones verging on a phobia, writing a quick message on WhatsApp or Instagram is easy, and sending emojis would save the precious energy even more. My next question to him was, if we all work on such methods to save our energy to avoid tiring ourselves, what are we saving this precious energy of ours for?
In the worst times of Covid-19, we really needed to save energy, and we clearly needed to be cautious when it comes to human contact. But what is really disturbing is what seems to be our collective inability to resist the distancing of human contact in numerous ways that technology has provided us. We have comfortably resorted to the very impersonal, mechanical action of sending an emoji or pressing a ‘like/dislike’ button as way of expressing ourselves when it comes to serious emotions from happiness to doubt to anger.
Stark difference
It is in these moments that I think back to the time a few decades ago when mobile phones, emails and WhatsApps and other future inventions of communication were yet to materialise. In comparison to now, there was a stark difference in actually talking to each other about life, the world and many more things that would vary from informative discourses to frivolous chitchats on those heavy instruments with dialing contraptions and in person over coffee or tea.
As a child, I recall, ours was one of the very few houses in our small enclave which had a phone because of my father’s job as a civil servant. This was the case until end of the 1970s.
Anybody who had to call someone or receive a call, came to our house. They invariably became a circle of acquaintances and friends who would have a cup of tea and chat about this and that either after the call or waiting for a return call.
Yes…when a death was reported, when one could not attend the funeral personally, a telegram with a message of sympathy carefully drafted was sent via telephone. Letters were written taking one’s time to share with each other snippets of their individual lives, joys and pains brining to mind Clarence Wijewardena’s timeless classic, ‘gamen liyumak awilla’ (a letter has come from home/the village). When one received a letter by post, yes, we had to take time to read it and reply, which again took time and energy. All these took one’s energy and time and we gave it without thinking of saving either.
While such letters too were executed across long distances, these letters were testimony to an energy that was self-consciously transferred to a tactile script, written in one’s own personal handwriting on paper, with its scratched-out words, scribbles, grammatical and spelling mistakes, and sporadic ink blobs that had the ability to compensate for the absence of proximity.
These handwritten words, someone’s mental, emotional and physical efforts had the ability to encompass the feeling of being human without falling into a mechanical and robotic practice of pressing an emoji button. This is because such letters had the richness of invested energy, reflected emotions and intimacy of the act itself. They represented a time given to others and ourselves because the act itself was important and precious for the continuity of life.
Electronic messages
We know well that WhatsApp and other forms of messaging are done while walking, talking, driving, cooking, in the middle of your shower and other multitasking endeavours that one so unthinkingly engages in nowadays. All these crisscrossing electronic messages are the result of the same mechanical act of million clicks that come from a mobile phone in which nothing may be saved for posthumous times. This way of communicating, I think may also take a toll on our individual and collective sense of memory as we write rapidly and in short bursts interspersed with emojis for complex feelings -- often without reflection or attention.
I am not lamenting over a bygone world or being anti-electronic media. But I am lamenting over the isolation that we ourselves create around us irrespective of the technology which in its own clinical way has given us virtual vistas and the possibility of putting a face to a voice.
Covid-19 has made webinars (through Zoom, Google Meetetc) blossom into a field of cherry flowers in springtime, and these are now unstoppable. They have become platforms for larger things of education, career advancement, for social influencing, talk shops for information exchange, publicity platforms and many more. These are all about engagement with the world, the society and whatever – but without the energy and reflection invested in a previous time.
Little pleasures
But what about the little pleasures of little things? A conversation with a friend just because you want to hear her/his voice, a mundane meandering of life, to tap into the emotional burdens of another just to feel that your capacity to feel is still alive, and just to feel you care. WhatsApp messaging cannot annotate the voice and nuances behind those words that are being typed. It certainly cannot express through an emoji the expression on that face, emotions in the eyes, the excitement reflected in your heartbeat and the depth of a sigh.
It has dawned upon me that we are now living in an era of mere ‘transactions’, short and swift. Sooner you finish, and get on with the next and the next, the better it would be. Shared personal histories, or rather reminiscences of it becomes a burden – dispelled by both clinically operating technology and lack of time.
Loyalty and empathy seem unprofitable. I see in the not-so-distant future the emergence of a generation without history, not because there is no history, but because getting to know history and remembering it is an effort that they will not want to invest on.
It demands engagement, acknowledgement and care. These eat up energy and time, the energy saved for an unknown future. In this investment of our energy and time for the unknown, do we miss the whole purpose of what humanity is all about?
The writer is a visual artiste based in New Delhi and Colombo