If you're a teenager or a young adult right now, you probably no longer actively use your facebook account.
You probably understand the sentiment behind the statements "asdfghjkl," "I can't" and "too many feels."
You understand what the tweet "blueberry muffins >>>" means.
You probably have a tumblr account and know that you can tell how somebody is feeling by the way their blog looks.
You most likely know how to express your every emotion through reblogging and creating gifs and memes.
You spend hours a day, scrolling down your dashboard on tumblr or twitter or youtube. You watch videos, look at pictures, and read things that you like and appreciate. You enjoy them silently. You repost them if you want your followers to enjoy them too. You feel like these people that you've never even met know you better than your best friend does. You know how to say what you need to say using little or no words at all.
We've adapted.
Our parents grew up in a world where face-to-face or phone calls were the only way to talk to each other. (Unless you wanted to send snail mail, which probably wont still be an option for very long.) Then the internet was invented and everything changed. People discovered IM, email, and how easy it was to say whatever you wanted to say when you were hiding behind a computer screen. Then there were cell phones. With texting capabilities. Suddenly, text communication was portable and actual phone conversations had started to lose their allure.
And then there was Facebook. We discovered that we could see, hear, and say everything and anything we wanted to with our group of friends and even enemies without ever having to leave our bedroom. You could type long winded rants and make Facebook note. You could tell everyone that funny thing that happened to you at the mall in your status update. All at one time without ever having to move more than your fingers. In person/phone conversations went permanently out the window.
It's been that way for years now. We don't talk anymore. I mean...I see it happen all the time where people who never ever talk in person develop deep relationships over texts and twitter. They text and tweet day and night and tell each other "everything." Yet when they pass by each other in the halls they don't even glance up. Most likely because they have no idea how to speak face to face. It would be awkward and possibly messy and you don't have time to plan what you're going to say next.
Adults argue that's not a real relationship. We challenge them to define real.
Now I can't say that I view all of that as completely bad. It's how I've grown up. I have friends who I text more than I physically speak to. The thing that bothers me is that it's showing no signs of stopping.
As a mentioned earlier, this is no longer the age of facebook. Facebook was merely a stepping stone on the path to something else. Something much different.
It's all about visuals. Pictures of places and people and things that describe our moods or desires. Picture with a few words on them, short statements, or internet lingo (memes.) Pictures that move and show a brief moment in time that we find relate able or the perfect expression of our feelings at that moment (animated gifs, usually from movies and tv shows.)
Great right? We've gone back to pictograms. High-tech, HD, moving pictograms for sure, but still. It seems like we're going backwards almost. At first I thought it was really cool during one of those "too many feels moments" when I couldn't describe how I was feeling so I reblogged something. And then it became addictive and now I do it all the time.
So what's the big deal right? It's just another means of communication!
No.
Because those gifs and memes are pictures of OTHER PEOPLE dealing with the things we are dealing with. They are words of OTHERS who have gone through the stuff we are beginning to deal with. So by communicating via tumblr we're letting others speak for us instead of speaking ourselves.
As this continues and is taken to greater and greater extremes (as everything always does) what if we begin using this as our primary means of communication.
What's gonna happen when somebody asks me something and instead of words coming to mind, I think of a gif of somebody I saw the other day. And because of that I just can't think of to SAY so I find that gif and show them. And then they show me a meme in response. And we both nod in silent appreciation and we understand each other.
What's going to happen when we forget how to speak?
