WhatsApp has truly revolutionized the way people and groups stay connected throughout the globe.
Hundreds of millions of people use it. People get updates from family and friends and any groups they are a part of. I have a term for using this platform : WhatsApping. I feel it’s a wonderful tool in mainstream society, however, for me it has been anything but and this includes texting.
I was 18 and a college freshman in the fall of 1995 when I first got access to the internet and email.
It was such an incredible thing to communicate with someone anywhere in the world and get a response in a few minutes and hours. I also loved the internet which I used to call the world wide web or www.
Pretty soon in the early 2000s Blackberry’s came out and that also transformed communication because you could now do it in seconds. And we all know what happened once Apple introduced the iPhone to the world. The rest is history.
So back to texting and WhatsApp. As I said in one of my last blogs the social isolation and loneliness I feel. Initially I thought that WhatsApp and texting would help me stay connected and in touch with a wide variety of people. It did not end up that way for me at all! It may be instant communication, but people are inundated with so many texts every second, many people just do not answer most of them. I find most of if not all my family and friends either do not reply to texts or they take days to get back to me. I am very mindful that these days most people can’t communicate even via texting regularly and so I limit my communication to every few weeks or months. Even then, I do not get replies!
I find the little communication I may have with people via texting is so robotic and impersonal.
Happy Birthday! Happy Holidays! Happy (fill in the blank)! Or they send me a bunch of pictures or vice versa and the response is the same : How cute! Great! Nice pictures! Etc. I feel I may as well be communicating with a robot or wall. As I go down the list of people on my WhatsApp list I am left to wonder : gosh, how many people can I even call on the phone to have a real human conversation? Are we truly connected? Almost none.
For me, WhatsApp and texting has not enabled me to cultivate any form of genuine and meaningful communication or connections. Perhaps it has for others. I realize I am just old school and I want my life to be enriched with relationships where I can get face to face contact and generate interesting conversations. I have decided to limit my use of this media… I don’t get enough texts anyway so I just put my WhatsApp in my iCloud section. Time to move on…
Author: Lavaanya Pasupuleti
Editor(s): Daniel Watson
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