1's & 0's

I read an article a few days ago that reported teens today are less interested in owning a car than those of previous generations. It is really curious, at least to me, that this is the case.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a time when our whole focus growing up was acquiring a car and with it the freedom that driving brought.  My generation lived, breathed, dreamed about, planned our lives around and generally obsessed over car ownership.  It wasn't just a people shell with four wheels.

Vo-Tech auto shop was full of guys learning about how to build, repair and customize cars from the wheels to the roof, the front bumper to the rear and from the interior to the paint.

We torn apart our cars to learn how they work, what went wrong and what

needed to be done to make it go again. We put those cars on the dynamometer to see how much horsepower we could wring out of them, then we would tweak, modify, customize and experiment to try to get more.

Most of all, we learned to work together to problem solve, innovate as a team to achieve our ultimate goal, a really great ride.  We sat together at lunch and told stories, laughed, joked, planned and dreamed of our futures.  In the process we learned to communicate on so many different levels.

According to the article in the Los Angeles Times:

“Thirty years ago, nearly half of 16-year-olds had a driver's license, their passport to independence. By 2010, that figure had dropped to 28 percent, according to research from the University of Michigan.

“The cultural shift is largely the result of technology that keeps teens connected to one another and the coolest new stuff without ever getting into a car. All the adolescent staples -- music, movies, clothes, books -- are available with a mouse click or smartphone swipe.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love my smartphone. It allows me to do things that back in the day would have taken a library, an atlas, a compass, a weather station, a post office, a checkbook, a calculator, a very thick stack of notepads, a tape recorder, a hi-fi, a very nice camera, a couple of shopping malls and a bunch of things I would have never thought of back then. Oh yeah, and a telephone too.

What's sad is not that phones have replaced cars but that 1s and 0s have replaced personal interaction, eye contact, touch, the inflection of voice. We're enamored with the technology of communication rather than the art of communication.

Yes, you can type, text and tweet across the room or across the world in an instant, but the subtlety of a wink, a slight grin, an inflection of voice or body language is completely lost, in the process so is much of the language of communication.  Emoticons are a poor substitute of the nuance of verbal and physical communication.

I learned this the hard way a few years back when I began my foray into technology. I emailed a friend and business partner what was, in my mind as I typed, a humorous, snarky and friendly comment about a personal matter.

When he exploded back at me I was aghast and clueless at his, to my point of view, overreaction.  As we ultimately talked about it, we both learned a lesson about electronic communication and its inherent flaws.  Unfortunately, the seeds of distrust were sown and neither the friendship nor the business survived much longer.

Maybe today’s teens have solved the built in weaknesses of text.  But even if they have, the vibrancy of language and the subtleties of physical expression lead to a far richer and dynamic conversation than thumb tapping.

You have to understand, I’m a guy and as such I’m genetically predisposed to

holding it in and reluctant to talk about the tough, uncomfortable things of life.  But even in my flawed state I understand that done right, nothing beats those heads together confabs.

Yes, it takes a lot of practice to master, and time, and effort.  But the personal, intellectual and emotional growth that comes with full on exposure to another person more than makes up for the inconvenience of actually having to look someone in the eye when you talk to them.

That’s something no chunk of silicon and plastic will ever be able to do.

ttyl