(Approx. 877 words)

Face Time in the 21st Century 
Lou's Views by Lou Vitale, President, Macon County Users Group, North Carolina
www.maconusersgroup.org
mug(at)maconusersgroup.org

Obtained from APCUG with the author's permission for publication by APCUG member groups.

Person to person communication was pretty simple last century. There was the letter, or as we call it today, “snail mail” and the telephone. Our address book contained the physical address of our friends and their phone numbers. It is amazing to me how much we actually got done, we won wars and went to the moon and created the greatest county on earth, and all without a single bit of digitized information. 

To someone who grew up in the last 20 or so years that must seem quaint. They probably can't imagine life without a cell phone, email, IM and a dozen other ways of communicating with their fellow human beings. I am beginning to wonder myself. Someone asked me the other day if I “Twittered”, I thought it was a neurological disorder. No, it was a form of micro-blogging, another way to stay in touch in the 21st century. 

So just how many ways can you keep up to the minute with your “friends” today, let me count the ways. And this is by no means a complete list. 

Email has been around since the beginning of the internet. By the late 80s' everyone with a computer had an email account. Now we could send a message to anyone with a computer and they could reply. This was a momentous social change. It significantly accelerated the communication between people. Plus we could “attach” stuff, like pictures of the grandkids, or an excel spread sheet to our email. 

In it simplest form, a blog (web log) is an online diary or journal. Prior to the mid 90's online forums and BBS (bulletin board systems) allowed people to have running conversations on a web site with a moderator to keep order. Then some high profile personalities started to keep online diaries which allowed comments from anyone to be posted, and the blog was born. 

Today bogging is a serious force to be reckoned with. Anyone can start a blog and thousands do every day. Currently there are an estimated 12 million blogs and about 57 million blog readers. These numbers are deceiving, since it appears that only about 20% of blogs are active and 60% to 80% of blogs are abandoned after one month. As one commentator put it “the average blog has the life span of a fruit fly”. 

Yet this kind of personal communication has again changed the social landscape. Anyone can comment on anything from personal hygiene to politics and anyone can respond with their take on the subject. Some bloggers have aspired to become journalists and others are just looking for some virtual recognition, either way we are more in touch. 

Personal communication has taken another leap with the creation of social networking sites like Face Book and My Space. These sites and many others like them allow virtual conversation to take place between friends on an almost instant basis. I will confess, I don't know much about them which only proves my age. But without a doubt, and from now on a person's identity will forever be linked to their Face Book page and their list of friends. 

Will someone please explain to me why someone would attempt to communicate by text using a device no bigger than a deck of cards and with a “Key Board” consisting of 12 keys? At a minimum IM (Instant Messaging) requires tiny fingers, superb eye hand coordination and a new language consisting of thousands of newly created letter combinations to represent real words. And another thing since this device is a Phone, why not just TALK to the person? LOL 

The ultimate “Personal” communication for the 21st century must be in Second Life. In this enormous virtual world millions of people interact with millions of other people, one on one. The whole range of human activity can now take place in a virtual environment. You can be anyone you want and “talk” to a dragon or a real priest, free of the most basic limitation of our human form. In a sense this is probably personal communication on a level never seen before. 

Twitter is the newest “form” of communication. It answers the pressing question, “What are you doing NOW?” As you go through your day, you constantly update your “Twitter” page with mini blog entries no more than 140 characters long. Now anyone who is logged o to your page can tell what you are doing, what you are feeling, who you are with and any moment in the day. Why didn't I think of that? It's obvious that I would want to know all the mundane details of all my friends' daily lives. 

Face time means actual face to face talk. The words, the eyes, the body language, the context, all convey meaning. Let me know when we can do that online. Until then, don't look for my Twitter page. 

This article has been provided to APCUG by the author solely for publication by APCUG member groups. All other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).