iLiza's eyes

Sometimes I get mad at the media for the way they depict my generation. Usually it annoys me because the articles I read are written by a bunch of middle-aged, talented yet out-of-touch journalists who look down from their perch and try to explain teenagers and people my age to the public. They write exposes about Facebook or AIM or cell phone use as if they themselves are insiders on both teams--they are "in" with the young generation but also peers of the middle-aged readers-- and so they can explain one to the other.

For the most part, I find that they can't. And usually when I read articles about my generation-- about kids who multi-task and spend money on iPods and play video games and use their cell phones a lot--I just want to scream at the paper, "You don't get it! Your lingo is wrong, your perspective is wrong! This is just all wrong!"

That is until today. Because today, I witnessed an anecdote that I had accused the paper of falsifying. I saw a peer do exactly what I thought was exagerrated in a recent article, and I looked around and realized it was going on everywhere.

The history class I'm taking this semester is taught by a great professorial mind-- one of the most famous historians on the Holocaust and Jewish history. And that's good-- I better be getting taught by a great mind like that, I'm paying obscene amounts of money to go to a prestigious school. And that's the thing: so is everyone else. People are paying lots of money to attend that very class and hear that very person speak. So, you can imagine how disgusted I was when I was distracted by a flashing of a computer screen during lecture today.

Okay, I know. We're in college-- lots of people bring computers to class to type notes, and if I wasn't so into lightening my load for the walk to school, I probably would too. But the flashing on the computer screen was not caused by someone furiously writing notes, it was caused by an IM, and the kid proceeded to drop his notes, stop listening to the lecture and type to his friend for the remaining 45 minutes.

To make it worse, the kid wasn't in the back of the room, he was in the front. So half the class could see him typing to his friend. In addition, the classroom is packed, there's not an empty seat in the house, with about 50-60 students in attendence, so the poor girl next to him frivolously writing notes also got to read and be distracted by his IM conversation, and everyone around him could read what he was writing.

In general, I'm a pretty big fan of my generation. I don't have a problem with cell phones, I love the internet and I think that AIM and Skype are really awesome ways to keep in touch with people. I also think that Facebook is cool if you don't let it rot your brain and if you're not a complete idiot (this can be left for development in a future post, because I have a lot to say about it).

The problem that I have with my generation and all the cool technological stuff that we have is that we've become really bad at prioritizing experience. Under no circumstance should a menial conversation with your friend trump listening to a brilliant historian (whose class your paying for, although that shouldn't even really matter) lecture about a topic that you claim to care about. Even text messaging during class, which is really common and which journalists have not really picked up on yet, which shows just HOW out of touch they often are, is a pretty disrespectful behavior that should be avoided.

The point is that with all this stimulation and media around, we forget that face-to-face communication is actually much more meaningful and important than gadgets and virtual communication. We've put everything on the same plane, so that talking to your friend during class online is the same as passing notes used to be, or even the same as actually listening to the professor talk. And that's scary, because it means that we could technically live in a little virtual bubble and not realize that we were missing human contact, body language and confrontational communication with immediate consequence. Maybe we'll be having virtual dinners with our children instead of sitting around the dining room table and engaging about our day.

Again, I'm still a fan of my generation and all the cool things we know how to use and have access too, but I think that there are also huge down sides when we abuse the access to that technology, when we become so absorbed in it that we become dependent on it and start to isolate ourselves from what's going on in the world directly around us. I mean, we pay money to watch the Holocaust professor speak for a reason-- if we didn't, we could just watch him online from our beds in our virtual bubbles.

posted by iliza @ 11:29 PM