Connections?

Twittering furiously for over a fortnight even though I don’t have a single close friend or family member on it. Who do I write for, I wonder? And why indeed do I put in the effort? FB and Orkut are sites where I have FnF available so I do communicate. But twitter is…..what? Maybe it’s just an attempt to reach out and touch someone. Reams have been written about how insulated we have become in our modern lives, how out of touch we are with a social network to support us and nourish us. Even someone with tastes as Bohemian as mine feels the occasional need (loathe though I am to admit it) to socialize. But with the absence of time, opportunity and energy, we often find ourselves retreating into a cocoon, more and more cut off from the world around us. And it is this emptiness that ‘social networking’ sites tend to fill. Too busy with work, so SN sites offer the convenience of logging in whenever we have the time, regardless of whether the people we want to interact with are there at the same time. No opportunity to socialize outside the workplace, so SN sites offer the choice of adding ‘friends of friends’ or even complete strangers who we might share a common interest with. No energy to go out and meet people, so SN sites give us our entire social circle in our laps, so to speak.
But even these lines of communication are undergoing a change. Time is a quantity that seems to be in shorter and shorter supply. From 3-4 page letters to one page e-mail to 10 word scraps. From lengthy diary entries to blogs to a 160 letter limit twitter. How much shorter will it get, I wonder? Will grunts soon replace scraps? An ‘ugh’ or an ‘argh’ in place of ‘lolz’, ‘wtf!” maybe? But no matter what happens and how busy we become and how little the time we get to spend in company, we will not cease from it. In one way or another, humanity will continue to communicate and interact and exchange ideas and information or just plain gossip. Old timers bemoan the loss of the hand-written letter which was a source of memories that was kept safe for generations. In the age of e-mail, they say, what will become of such social moorings. Then the other day someone told me she had kept a copy of all mail sent to her by her close friends, e-mail sent over the last 10 years or so and I thought, “Maybe it’s not all so bleak”. Our search for anchors and some constants in an ever faster changing world is strong and one of the strongest roots we tend to grow is our network of friends and family. One way or another, we will strive to keep our roots alive, even if in place of perfumed letters bound in ribbons, we hand over to our descendants a pen drive full with our precious e-mails and e-cards!