Face-to-Face Conversation: A Solution for Isolationjjfdvjihg

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-t
echnology-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