Sheep happens.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Face to Face

It seems like I have run out of things to say, with the exception of rants about the superficiality that is so dominant within the boundaries of many friendships today. Countless experiences shared between people are peripheral and ephemeral, without any profound connections of the agreeable nature being established as time passes. What are the friendships of today based on? Without deviating from facts, other than those which technology has brought about, people of today are making friends for the same old reasons that people of the past century have.

You could be friends with someone who just happened to take the same bus with you to school; you could be friends with a stranger you met on the train whom you offered a seat to; you could even be friends with someone just because he sat next to you in the restaurant and started a conversation with you.

Maybe communications had a part to do with it, maybe technology has somehow removed the sociable aspect of humanity? Science has advanced technology in such a way that people can now be represented by a cocktail of pixels on a computer screen, even by a series of seemingly meaningless combinations of letters. Verbal conversations can now be reduced to mere prose, projected to even the very ends of the world through an intricately sculpted maze of cables, or even through electromagnetic waves in the air. You can now communicate with just about everyone in the world who has an internet connection or a cell phone. In a sense, if a number could be put to the degree of individual accessibility to the world, this number would probably have been multiplied by a hundred times or even more within the past decade or so.

Somehow, this superficiality that has its roots in the flaws of long-distance conversations have propagated into the real interpersonal conversations in everyday life. Words can scarcely be found between so-called "friends" of today when it is a face-to-face encounter, unlike a virtual encounter where words flow freely without any hinderance. Of course, few absolutes can be found today and it can be said for certain that this hypothesis does not hold true for everyone. It probably is that barrier that people today put up around themselves to ward off possible threats to their personal images, unlike the times when people were more trusting and truly friendly because they had nothing to lose by making an extra friend.

I'm just some guy trying to make sense of what is going on around him, and why certain things happen when they should not be happening. The coldness of certain encounters are really freaking me out.