Is it harder to know each other in a world full of technology?
When I met you in the neighborhood, through my family, in my workplace, the world we inhabited was smaller, the boundaries easier to define.
When most everyone we knew worked at the same job or profession until retirement, we’d always know, more or less, where to find them and what they’d be doing.
When it cost a small fortune in either time or money to connect with anyone far away, our options were limited in a way they no longer are.
Many more options mean so many more possibilities and therefore more attendant risk factors. Is there more of me too, or less?
Do we respond to the expanding horizons and escalating change by becoming more focused? Maybe an endless menu is a good thing, as long as I don’t starve by the time I get through it. Sometimes a session of Pin The Tail On The Donkey starts to sound appealing.
It’s easier and faster to do things electronically (until you run into a snag), but I miss many aspects of human contact that are disappearing.
If I see you every day or every week, it is easier to learn to trust you, I think, but maybe the things we reveal of ourselves will be different.
Will we know more or less of one another?
I’m musing on trust today.
How to meet people, network, connect, form relationships, find the right anyone do anything with …the more we are physically separated by technology, the more I hear and read people addressing these questions… perhaps this is only one question. Maybe the reality hasn’t changed at all, and the only thing different is the extent to which we can now hear everyone ‘thinking out loud’. The openness is fresh air, yet stepping into it can be to encounter a claustrophobia inducing cacophony. How strange, really, to be able to hear so many thinking out loud while talking to no one.
As our physical landscape, influenced by mobility and global perspectives, begins to shift beyond established homogeneous cultural environments, our daily interactions gradually change in form. Are they changing in substance? Certainly one of the most dramatic changes in our societal structure shaped through recent decades by media and increased communication is the erosion of trust.
Trust occupies the core of every relationship, family, personal, or business, yet rarely do we name or consciously examine it. It is the pure, uncluttered bond of the scientist to facts, and of the devoted to the tenets of their faith in every religion. How strange, I think, that people so readily pledge their deepest loyalty to intangible concepts, yet often balk at doing the same with another human being.
To trust and be trusted means being responsible. It carries obligations and consequences together with rewards. It is a gift and an honor and a burden.
Is trust basic to our nature or a construct?
