I have an iPhone. It’s pretty sweet, I guess. As the commercials prod, there’s an app. for pretty much anything you could want or need, and tons more. I can calculate the tip at dinner, call my grandma or text my friend, entertain myself with music, games, and social media sites, add to a business document, send a colleague a guest list for a show, and the list goes on and on. I could never actually talk to someone face to face for the rest of my life and live through my phone (wouldn’t you love that, Steve Jobs??).
The quality of personal interaction, though, is severely underrated by the average tech-lover today. In a time of on-demand information, technology, and the internet, people are forgetting how to interact with each other, work together, and how to communicate in general. People have much shorter tempers, are unwilling to compromise, and they expect to get whatever they want, whenever they want. One has to wonder if this has caused a higher divorce rate in our country than the marriage rate. If you have grown up behind a computer screen or playing video games, when would you have learned that compromise is a part of building and growing relationships, that words are important and are worth choosing carefully?
Interacting with others and learning humility, patience, and compromise are the most important, and often challenging, skills that one could ever learn. And downplaying the importance of personal interaction is one of the biggest mistakes we are making in our culture today.
