“Life without community has produced, for many, a life style consisting mainly of a home-to-work-and-back-again shuttle. Social well-being and psychological health depend upon community”. – Ray Oldenburg
This week marks the release of the iPhone, and I note this as someone who used an Apple in graduate school, sorta (that means I means I paid someone else to type my thesis on an Apple IIe with one 400k floppy drive). My first computer was a 1984 Mac II with an Imagewriter. Best monochrome monitor anybody ever made. I still have all that kit, along with a few semi-defunct first generation iMacs. I reluctantly joined the PC/Windows world a few years back and still have trouble finding my data much of the time. Sigh.
I write this to acknowledge the iPhone because I’m waitin’ on a friend, she is overdue, and she does get lost, dear thing. But she has some sort of cell phone with an out-of-state area code (nobody seems to have been in Florida long enough to have new cell phone contracts), so I’m not gonna worry about her. If she printed the directions I sent her through our MySpace accounts, she’ll arrive in good stead.
She remarked some days ago that the MySpace birthday notifications prompt behavior a bit like leaving one’s Calling Card in the days when Ladies had Calling Hours. It revives a social nicety that so many of us lack in this, our society of isolation, and I grudgingly agreed. I do leave cute little pictures or notes for virtual strangers, wishing them Happy Mother’s or Father’s Day. It makes me feel good to leave them, and good to get them. It’s a weird cyber-popularity contest. More on that another time. Maybe.
And this brings me back to my original point.
I’m not sure we’re better connected these days, for all of our technology. I aver that the best social contact I had was in 1982 when I was a student in England. I was thousands of miles away from family, but right at home. I had no computer, no cell or any other phone, no Internet, and for a good six months, no television.
Now don’t feel sorry for me or be appalled! What I did have was a library full of newspapers (not the least of which was The International Herald Tribune), a Student’s Union with pub and coffee shop, and the Royal Mail. Twice a day! Early post came by 6am and late post, if I was lucky enough to get some (late post was often parcels!), arrived by 3pm. But only five days a week. I lived two stories up and on the back of the building, but when I heard that brass mail slot clink before dawn, I’d hare right down and get the mail, leaving it for the various other recipients as I passed their doors. Post was better than the newspaper that we thumbed every day. We’d get our current events, world, local and gossip at the Student’s Union, but the Post, that was just different. A letter sent from one end of England, or one end of a village would always always ALWAYS be delivered the following day. One made appointments and assignations that way. It WAS possible to make lunch date for Wednesday via Monday’s post. Mail from the States came within a week most of the time. When we needed to make the rare phone call, there were domestic and international call boxes.
The most important tool we had was actual human-on-human interaction! Our easiest and most reliable form of contact with our friends was to show up, just show up. In a day when not many people locked their doors, the barriers were few, and the obstacle of a few blocks’ walk was never daunting. And if we found nobody at the destination, we all had the good sense to have a pen and paper on hand to leave a note. A Calling Card as it were.
I’m glad I lived without before I got to choose from the myriad types of new communication. I’m glad because I got to experience what Urban Sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “Third Places” with first and second places being home and work. In his book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops. Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, Oldenburg identifies, interprets, laments the decline, and encourages the revival of such community centers. In my childhood, we had them at Church or Synagogue, at Scouts, at Libraries, neighborhood markets and block parties (and in England, down the pub). We used to know our bank-tellers, our pharmacists, and the nice lady at the corner shop. Now we do our banking at ATMs, get our medications by mail, shop on-line or in mega-stores. We’ve taken to conveniences that make it possible for us to rush home, our first places, from our jobs, our second places, to check our email and catch whatever we put on our TiVo the previous day.
Have these time-saving strategies done more than just give us more time to isolate? Oh I could argue both sides of it. Since I’m working from home for now, I don’t even have a second place! So I joined my local library and go to our dog park a few times a week in search of good third places. But the flip-side? I met my husband on-line. I found my last business on-line. My house? You guessed it: found it on-line. Even Radar, our precious hound, was rescued from a virtual shelter.
Yeah, with the burgeoning use of texting, emailing, and social networking sites like Classmates, MySpace and FaceBook, we’ve all lost and found so much.
Ironic that I’m even discussing this on a BLOG on a book-selling website when I’d rather talk about it in person. I’m so glad my new friend is on her way over.