Evolution of Social Interaction Through Generations

Social interaction has changed through generations. There was a time where if you wanted to contact someone, you had to mount your horse and sometimes ride hundreds of miles. Then came the invention of the postal service, delivering messages in a more efficient way, but sometimes taking weeks to arrive to the recipient. Later came the telegraph, and eventually the landline telephone. As distant communication has been on the rise, people have been having an increasing reliance on social interaction. The smartphone made this a horrifying reality. Since the invention of the smartphone, we feel inclined to constantly be in touch with someone or something. The connection feeds our hunger for attention. In Gabby Bess’ collection, Alone With Other

She seems to be going through some sort of meltdown, as she is pouring milk in the floor for no apparent reason. She then moves to technology for her next form of entertainment. “Paige sat down at the kitchen table and stared at her iPhone. She touched the screen and tried to will messages to appear. She was waiting for something, anything, to happen” (Bess 35). This shows she was so desperate for any type of connection, that she was trying to magically make her messages appear. The word choice truly displays the fact that she is lonely, and missing human contact. The way Bess says that Paige tried to “will” messages to her phone and that she was waiting for “something, anything, to happen” accurately displays her need for social interaction. It is later revealed that she was waiting for a text from her boyfriend, Adam. The definition of him acknowledging her existence is through sending her a text message. The difference between our technological generation and generations before, is the fact that now we need something as simple as a text message to show we care. In the times leading to the texting craze, you would have to either send a handwritten letter or physically visit that person. This is a clear-cut example of how we have changed the way we interact, simply because of technology. It also mentions that Paige and Adam had not actually seen each other in

The argument is not that communicative technology is killing face-to-face interaction, but it is limiting it. It is building a lack of desire for face-to-face encounters. We only face each other when it is absolutely necessary and while some may disagree that it is such a bad thing, we are physiologically designed to interact face-to-face. That way we can truly read people and interpret how they are feeling or how they are trying to come across to us. Without knowing things like facial expressions and body language, it is hard to know how one is