I’m just sitting here watching my kids do their homework. As I look at some of the new methods of adding and subtracting, my mind immediately sends a message…”that’s not how we did it.” Now when I think about it, just because that’s not how I was taught does not make their new system wrong, nor does it make it right. It is just different.
It seems to be the same with all of our new ways to communicate. None of the new methods are necessarily bad, nor are they necessarily better than the old way of just picking up the phone. They are just different.
The biggest change I see today is that we seem to be communicating when we often don’t have anything of value to say. In an effort to fill content, some areas of media and communication tend to put a spin on the facts, just so it comes across a bit differently than anyone else. I really don’t have a problem with the idea that my kids would rather text than make an actual call. Where my problems arise is that we no longer have any outlet where we can get the facts on anything. Nearly every form of communication is simply someone telling a story from their perspective.
Now maybe it has always sort of been this way and it just wasn’t that obvious. If so, I was happy living in that state of delusion. But moving forward, we really don’t need to ask ourselves why everyone is so skeptical these days. With the absence of actual facts in any sort of modern communication, how can we not be?