Face-to-Face Conversation: A Solution for Isolation

by Mary Antonette Dagaraga, BMED-1

10:30 - 12:00 TF

Throughout the century where we are living our lives with the presence of technology, we
have admitted that at some point, our lives have become easier. The rise of the technology has
great impact on the existence of mobile devices, like cellphones, tablets and etcetera for it was
the most widely used by people nowadays. Almost everyone in this generation has their own
mobile devices whether it may be the better kind or just the good kind. Thus, based on my
own observation, people are likely using these things improperly wherein they tended to not
notice they are being locked up inside their gadgets instead of choosing to seek for the beauty
of life in reality. One of the worst product of this was the so called "alone together" issue,
wherein people are simply there together on the same place but are actually being bounded by
the distance their gadgets had brought and caused th
According to Ravitch, 2017, a parent rebellion was brewing, because parents want their
children to taught by a human being, not a computer. They fear that their children will be
mechanized, standardized, subjected to depersonalized instruction, not "personalized
learning." While many entrepreneurs are investing to softwares to capture this burgeoning
industry, there is still no evidence that students learn more or better when taught by a
computer. People are blinded by the sudden emerging of technology, which stresses that
people are really ignorant of having their lives easier with technology that often times we
chose to just leave everything to technology, even having your own classes inside the internet
using gadgets was already present. Communication was not being practiced physically and
emotionally within us.

According to Turkle, 2012, people are accustomed to a new way of being "alone together"
where it was technology-enabled, people are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere,
connected to wherever they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to
move in and out of where they are because the thing they value most is control over where
they focus their attention. People have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of loyal to
their own party. For example, when your friend invited you to go to an outing, everything
goes well in the event but then he or she was busy scrolling in his/her phone. You can see how
bad it works for even we are constantly physically present together but we ended up hiding
from one another, because mostly, the famous trends nowadays is taking a picture on a
particular event or something, wearing a very big smile in ones faces but actually what
happened in this matter is that those people were literally not enjoying the outing, lead to
boredom. Laziness, boredom, sadness, fear and hopelessness, for me, these are the following
main products of being too much with our technological devices, specifically mobile gadgets
accessible to the internet. People do not want to feel alone or isolated that is why they seek for
attention, care, comfort inside the tiny device not realizing they've got this whole world
around them and a lot of people to talk with, to share experiences of joy, sorrow and whatever
they want to talk about, people are afraid to be alone but they still chose to. They chose to,
because nowadays they knew that if they try to open up, they are going to be neglected by
others a part of knowing they have the same mindset as them.

According to Turkle again, in today's workplaces, young people who have grown up fearing
conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the
campus of high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing, "we are together, but each of us is in
our bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. This indicates that
people are only connected with other people through the use of their gadgets, which means
that conversation or communication occurs inside their devices and not that they are
physically interacting with each other. This seemed to be a very bad result for me, because as
we are continuing this thing, we are not practicing our mouth to speak, most especially we
might not be able to express ourselves and how we literally feel towards others and stuffs
because we can actually choose to show other people what we want them to see us rather than
who we really are for we can always delete or edit the mistakes we typed or whatsoever and
even with the usage of emojis and positive-negative words that we unfortunately do not know
whether or not the person was telling, expressing the truth about his/her feelings and anything
or not. Face-to-face conversation is very essential, because that's how you know a person,
through his/her contacts, gestures, actions, words that are not filtered many times and etcetera.
Face-to-face conversation also conveys trust from one another and enables people to have
greater understanding, because he/she can see how the other person was being sincere about
what he/she is talking. In short, face-to-face conversation is one of the best solution to this
"isolation" problem.

The world nowadays may be full of temptation and trickery but let this not cover the eyes of
our hearts and minds to look for a great hope that even if it is not easy to start a good chain
reaction, we can still try and try to begin a single step. We all have choices to make a
difference, it's up to us if what difference are we going to take. Could it be the hopeless side
of the picture or the hopeful side?

Reference:
Ravitch, D. (2017). 5 risk posed by the increasing misuse of technology in schools. EdSurge.
Retrieved from: https://www.edsurge.com/amp/news/2017-12-29-5-risks-posed-by-the-
increasing-misuse-of-technology-in-schools

Turkle, S.(2012).The flight of conversation. The New York Times, Sunday review, opinion.
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-
conversation.html