True, iphone is great, but I'm constantly staring into it at one
application or other.
I've tried, but I can't get into collecting facebook "friends", too
many trite posts mainly from former colleagues along the lines of "I
just made a cup of tea".
(And for the life of me, I don't know why John A. Davis wants to be my
facebook friend.)
I still haven't bothered with Tweets, assumed that's much the same.
Quite right, but the guy started losing me with the bit about losing
one's song, and "Try kissing more and tweeting less" is dangerous
advice for someone in a major city.
Other people have something to say, too. And when they don’t, that
glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to you than you
ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your song.
"Where do they teach you to talk like this? In some Panama City
"Sailor wanna hump-hump" bar, or is it getaway day and your last shot
at his whiskey? Sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here."
On 19 Jul 2010, at 04:41, Bruce Hershenson wrote:
What do you guys this of this NY Times Op Ed column?
Tweet Less, Kiss More
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 16, 2010
I was driving from Washington to New York one afternoon on
Interstate 95 when a car came zooming up behind me, really flying. I
could see in the rearview mirror that the driver was talking on her
cellphone.
I was about to move to the center lane to get out of her way when
she suddenly swerved into that lane herself to pass me on the right
— still chatting away. She continued moving dangerously from one
lane to another as she sped up the highway.
A few days later, I was talking to a guy who commutes every day
between New York and New Jersey. He props up his laptop on the front
seat so he can watch DVDs while he’s driving.
“I only do it in traffic,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”
Beyond the obvious safety issues, why does anyone want, or need, to
be talking constantly on the phone or watching movies (or texting)
while driving? I hate to sound so 20th century, but what’s wrong
with just listening to the radio? The blessed wonders of technology
are overwhelming us. We don’t control them; they control us.
We’ve got cellphones and BlackBerrys and Kindles and iPads, and
we’re e-mailing and text-messaging and chatting and tweeting — I
used to call it Twittering until I was corrected by high school kids
who patiently explained to me, as if I were the village idiot, that
the correct term is tweeting. Twittering, tweeting — whatever it is,
it sounds like a nervous disorder.
This is all part of what I think is one of the weirder aspects of
our culture: a heightened freneticism that seems to demand that we
be doing, at a minimum, two or three things every single moment of
every hour that we’re awake. Why is multitasking considered an
admirable talent? We could just as easily think of it as a neurotic
inability to concentrate for more than three seconds.
Why do we have to check our e-mail so many times a day, or keep our
ears constantly attached, as if with Krazy Glue, to our cellphones?
When you watch the news on cable television, there are often
additional stories being scrolled across the bottom of the screen,
stock market results blinking on the right of the screen, and promos
for upcoming features on the left. These extras often block
significant parts of the main item we’re supposed to be watching.
A friend of mine told me about an engagement party that she had
attended. She said it was lovely: a delicious lunch and plenty of
Champagne toasts. But all the guests had their cellphones on the
luncheon tables and had text-messaged their way through the entire
event.
Enough already with this hyperactive behavior, this techno-tyranny
and nonstop freneticism. We need to slow down and take a deep breath.
I’m not opposed to the remarkable technological advances of the past
several years. I don’t want to go back to typewriters and carbon
paper and yellowing clips from the newspaper morgue. I just think
that we should treat technology like any other tool. We should
control it, bending it to our human purposes.
Let’s put down at least some of these gadgets and spend a little
time just being ourselves. One of the essential problems of our
society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that
surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and
that includes our own individual needs — those very special, mostly
nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives,
enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us.
There’s a character in the August Wilson play “Joe Turner’s Come and
Gone” who says everyone has a song inside of him or her, and that
you lose sight of that song at your peril. If you get out of touch
with your song, forget how to sing it, you’re bound to end up
frustrated and dissatisfied.
As this character says, recalling a time when he was out of touch
with his own song, “Something wasn’t making my heart smooth and easy.”
I don’t think we can stay in touch with our song by constantly
Twittering or tweeting, or thumbing out messages on our BlackBerrys,
or piling up virtual friends on Facebook.
We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives. We need to savor
the trip. Leave the cellphone at home every once in a while. Try
kissing more and tweeting less. And stop talking so much.
Listen. Other people have something to say, too. And when they
don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to
you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your
song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become
really you.
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