Notice how you just don't get a response with email? The standard rejection letter for anything now is a no response. Once upon a time we used to get letters, responses from people saying, "no thank you, thank you for applying." In the cyber world the universal rejection letter is the black void. No response. Not even an effort to deem our request worthy. The impersonality of the computer world is affecting every day life. Humans talk. Not anymore. How often do you talk on the phone now? How often do you chat? Not much I'll bet. Whole lives are now carried on through the medium of the cyber word. And that makes for a pretty dull life. We love and hate email. It is a barrier against those we don't want to talk too and a moat against us when we want to talk to someone. You have to love corporations and the way they hide behind their websites. No longer do we have a human to complain too when the wheels fall off our car...no go to the website and register your complaint. It is the biggest firewall in the world. The human voice carries emotion, our humanity, the cyber word carries only information that can be deleted in a nanosecond. Even these blogs our highly expendable. A newspaper carried weight, it cried out with its very existence that it be recognized. The blog or the cyber news page is just a button away from vanishing. It is the expendable quality, the absolute evanescene of the interaction that is most frightening. We are human and at some point we will really want to have a conversation again with another human. So what is the guilty secret of email...we are our own worst enemies. We are now afraid of being engaged in a conversation. We are afraid our precious time will be used up by some person we cannot get off the phone. We would rather have those few sentences convey our business and be on on our way. We have now become slaves to cyber time lest we miss even a single nanosecond. Of course the backside of this is that when we do feel like talking to someone, there are few who will take our call. Those roads once closed are hard to reopen and we get an email a day later saying, "I saw that you called, sorry I was busy." The strange thing is we have relationships with people where we never hear their voice. That's weird. So our only chance is to break the cycle. The next time you get an email from a friend or colleague, freak them out and pick up the phone. They probably won't answer, but you never know. If you get them on the phone, blow their mind and say, "I'm just calling to chat." Stunned silence will probably greet you, but then again, they might say something. Humans are like that. Once they get talking, it's hard to shut them up.
