Back in the ol’ days…

You can’t pick up the telephone and say, ‘Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.’
- Howard Rheingold

Times have changed, and man is it impressive. Rheingold brings up a very valid point in saying that telephones are just not that valuable anymore. Years ago, we used to communicate through telephones and there is a reason why we left those years. Telephones are just not advanced enough to offer what we want. Those 500+ page telephone books? No ones uses them anymore, since it is so easy to search up a name online and find their contact information. We want to know everything, as soon as possible and the only way we can do that is by browsing the internet, since pretty much everything is on the internet. By calling, it is going to take a pretty good amount of time before you find your answer, whereas if we type a sentence in Google, odds are we are going to find our answer and more in just a few minutes. While Rheingold takes this a bit more intensely, it is what we do on a daily basis, no matter our age, and it is not necessarily for the better.

One way we approach delicate situations is very straightforward. We ask the internet. The picture above is a representation of those people who want their answer as soon as possible. The internet is slowly diminishing that relationship we have between one another. Often we are scared to ask friends or even our doctor over a potential problem/illness we may have, so we resort to asking Google since everything is ‘confidential’, and ‘no one knows’. We no longer confide in each other as much as we used to, and it is a result of the imposing power the internet has on us. We have everything we could want at the tip of our fingers on the internet, so why would we not use it?

Just another example of how much we trust the internet. Adults are asking the internet for advice more than they are asking their doctors. While doctors are professionals, the internet is more personalized, more often than not we look at what we want to see, and it is not always a good thing. We should revert back to the times where we had more conversations with one another, because what are we going to do when we cannot find our answer online? Who are we going to ask, and are we going to like what we see?