Tele-phone-Eh?

In Season Six (episode eighty, “Hop, Skip, and a Week”) of Sex and the City, the question of the week is, “Do we need distance to get close?”

I am left asking myself this. With all the options for networking out there, I can’t help but wonder if we can find away to put the Face back into Facebook?

I write for a living and am chained to my laptop enough during the day that when it comes to socializing I want to move away from the computer. In this sense I really miss having a typewriter. That is all it was able to do. Type. The page went in the top, and words came out. There were no wires, no photo galleries, no buddy pokes. Just simple basic words. And when you wanted to talk to someone, you had to meet up with them.
I guess I am just old fashioned and like the idea of hearing a person’s voice when I speak to them. Typing is a lonely road and there are moments when I think it should have stayed that way.

My family is addicted to Facebook.

My friends are addicted to Facebook.

No sooner have I logged out of there from receiving messages from my best friend in Edmonton then I get a message from a friend in Toronto and I have to log right back in. I have given them my email address but they always seem to forget it exists. My mother will phone me saying “I’m in Facebook how do I do blah blah,” and I will have to walk her through something which means I always spend another twenty minutes logged in. If Facebook minutes were clocked like gas mileage I would be paying a fortune daily.

And when it’s not my mother on the phone with a social networking problem the only others who call anymore are telemarketers, and those are automated. Are there no real people out there anymore?

People used to, at one point, say, “You don’t call anymore.” Now they (and yes I have to admit have done so myself) say, “You don’t Myspace, don’t Facebook, where’s the love?”

It makes one linger lovingly over the old idea of a crank call or even a psychic reader just for the connection of a real live voice.

Originally I sent this as an article for Divine Caroline.com Feb 22 2009