Cartoon by Lisa Tkach
Communication skills are one of the most important skills we can have as human beings. Without them, we aren’t able to speak properly, hold a conversation and get a message across to someone efficiently and effectively.
About a week ago I sat down to dinner with a huge group of my friends, looked around, and everyone was staring at their phones. One was on instagram, the others on Facebook and twitter or texting someone else.
It was at that moment that I looked at all of them and said “Why are we all on our phones? We are all together so we don’t need to be texting anyone else.”
They all looked at me like I had five heads and that I said something totally wrong. Everyone continued to look back at their bright white screen and tapped away.
Due to the growth of technology in the past couple of years, I strongly believe human beings’ ability to communicate has greatly decreased. One small example is shown above with my own friends.
Students especially are making such huge errors thanks to text messaging and all of the other things that we can do with technology. Instead of writing out full words on tests or papers, they tend to abbreviate things more often than not because it is “OK” to do that today.
Society lets us believe that it is OK to spell things wrong and forget about all of the grammar rules that were drilled into our heads at such a young age.
Like Dr. Andrew Weil, founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, states in his article Pressing the Bar, people sit on the train and tap away at their iPhones or iPads instead of communicating with someone next to them. They are so into the text message they just received or the email they need to respond to and they don’t even pay attention to any of their surroundings.
Weil refers to this problem as a “hijacking of our brains” and I completely agree with him. If we lose our ability to communicate properly with other humans what else do we have? Nothing.
It is very upsetting to me to see people text one another because they are too afraid to say something to someone’s actual face because it’s too “hard” to do in person. Face to face communication is something that people need to rely on. It’s what you need in the real world in your real jobs and its how we need to interact.
Sending a text message to someone or calling them to avoid seeing them in person is sad. We all do it. I have even done it before, but it needs to stop.
People need to put down their phones and learn to properly communicate with one another. If they can’t communicate in person it will seriously affect them in the long run.
If my dad was reading this right now he would say, “Kate, I told you so.” I never wanted to believe him when he told me that I should put down my cell phone and just speak. Parents always know best and now that I am in college and understand how important communication is, I also understand how technology has played a huge role in corrupting those skills.
I realize that technology has done many great things for society, but when it comes our ability to speak to one another and effectively communicate, we would be better off without it.
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