Essay #3

Cairo Montgomery
English 111
Essay 3

Keeping In Touch

    I have noticed throughout my years one of the things that seem to change most drastically and frequently are the actions of the phrase "keep in touch". The whole aspect of communication seems to develop and evolve every few years within itself. With new social networks and cell phone features beings created every few months, older forms of communication either seem to become obsolete or have completely changed. With the average teenager spending 31 hours on the internet per week, what does that mean is in store for the future of "keeping in Touch" when if you can't feel anything online?

    Listing to stories from my grandpatents about how life was when they were my age can be so stressful sometimes. It almost seems impossible that they would be able to maintain any relationship outside of their house hold. No cell phones, no internet, no gps. Like, how did they find anyone back then? I used to wonder sometimes, how did my grandfather approach my grandmother if it wasn't to get her phone number?  How did you plan on keeping in touch if neither of them could text each other? Comes to find out, what they would do after meeting someone they really liked was to either wait around until you bump into them again, or immediately plan to meet somewhere else. Now a days if you were to make plans right after an introduction it would come off as too forward or creepy. Although, in their time there seemed to be a much stronger energy behind meeting and getting to know people than we have now. They didn't have the luxury of being able to maintain distant relationships instantly and at a moments desire as we do now but relationships still seemed to have picked up right where they left off. Without the technology that we have today it was still possible to reach out to distant family and friends. The postal system was booming. I myself can remember back around my earlier years before everyone had an email address and a computer in every house. We would get so much mail. From, Christmas cards and pictures from family across the country, to post cards from traveling loved ones. Mail was the old fashioned way of updating your status, of course not as instant and frequent Twitter post, letters and post cards were a lot more heart felt and personal.

    I feel its safe to say that these days keeping in contact with someone is an extremely easy task. Assuming that the person you wish to contact is keeping up with the times, there should be a number of digital addresses that allow you to be able to reach them. It all starts with one Email address and the rest is history. In this day and age with out an email address you can't own a phone, get a job or even take a class at nova without one. We now have the luxury of sending messages to distant loved ones instantly with this creation, unlike the olden days where we waited around all week for letters to be delivered. These days sending and receiving messages through the mail is much more of a formal matter. The only messages being sent though mail are wedding invitations, holiday cards and money. With blogs, microblogging and social networking giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr, we now have the ability to share daily moments of our lives, opinions & ideas, and even play scrabble with a whole entire international network of friends, family and strangers. As tables and smart phones are acquired, portability plays a huge role in our ability to communicate instantly at every waking second. With cameras and videos being at our disposal following someone's life online can have a cinimatic feel to it.

    With the ability to communicate to a large range of followers instantly at our fingertips, updating everyone on our daily voyage through life eventually feels and becomes routine to us. Friends we haven't seen in months have the option of checking up on us as they please, and we do the same. Are we losing grasp of the genuine struggle of getting to know getting each other by following people? Maybe just before we part ways with long distant friends and family, instead of saying "keep in touch" we should just say "follow me".