the future of ____to face

Ok…so since we have set this site up, partly thanks to the incitement from john, who is as of yet still not excepted the invitation to participate in a blog he proposed the title of and party thanks to Chelsea who recommended that the blog just be open to whoever. I take the responsibility to write something on the white canvas or screen. Ethics is the basic choices we make in our lives. Sentient beings is what I eat. "we have a moral obligation to help as much as we have a moral obligation not to harm."


Its funny I think, in this naïve young questioning voice, but someone brought up an interesting point recently, which had something to do with our desire to have relationships with one another. He told me that we see more people in one day in the united states then our ancestors saw in their entire lives. This is great I though, we evolved out of the sole communication with our parents to extended family, then friends and friends of friends and now we are on a level in which our virtual connectivity spans as far as our language does. In America that connection is somewhere close to three hundred million, in china closer to one and a half billion, but as we have heard so many times before:“im not good on the phone” or “I hate skype” or "I can’t tell if your being sarcastic on gchat”
the evolutionary future before us is in this direction. Don’t get me wrong, im not blaming technology and I do believe that charm and vivacity is important in face to face encounters, but are people getting better on the phone or over skype and gchat? Are we going to call someone that is charming on skype, the same charming as face to face? We can’t be incredulous or dismissive about this, or at least I have decided not to be. I have an example of why I got started on this track, one of my good friends recently told me he went to a funeral for a friend that died. The friend that passed was twenty-five years old, and still had an active facebook page, the status read something silly and the pictures where insulting, and the wall kept getting filled because people did not know of his passing. No one knew his password, and facebook has no 1800 number one could call and let them know. Do they care, is not my point. Its not up to them. I circle back to the obsession with face-to-face relationships, to be witty charming, a gentlemen or ladies is beautiful, we hopefully learn how to be the best we can be in such terms. But then, we turn and lose all sense of this when confronted by a computer screen or I phone. What is meaningful here? I would say that we slowly start to develop a relationship in the trajectory of evolution that takes in account the virtual network as well as the local one. Face-to-face contact will always remain as it has since our ancestors but this new virtual face will have to be taught and it should not employ the same words feelings and tools to articulate it self as face-to-face interactions. The masks we create (regardless for which audience) towards one another are meaningful to our witnessing and being witnessed psyche. I hope we don’t become dependent on the vibration of our phones for company.