On this lovely Sunday afternoon i decided to do some indulging on Facebook by chatting up some of my virtual friends ( ones i have not met face to face) it is after all social networking! My first conversation;
Me: Hi
Friend 1 : Hi, your pics look hawt!OMG...!!! :-o
Me : Thanks.
Friend 1: How do u know Jane* and Carol*?.... if u know them then you must be coooool.....lol.
Me: (went offline)
I must say meeting someone online has become a bit more boring nowadays. I call it 'The Technology Curse on Dating '. Imagine you only need the Facebook name of a girl/guy you like! I miss high school dating. Back then, a guy had to sum up his courage to ask me for my name, postal address and sometimes even my class. After the first encounter I would wait patiently for a week or longer to get the letter. It was every Friday, letters were called out in the dining hall after supper. Imagine how I felt when my name was called out! I clutched the letter(s) so tightly. Not all letters passed as good, but generally let me sum up the - Characteristics of a good letter:
- The envelop had to be white and the recipients name written in caligraphy.
- The back had to have a tit bit like, 'Open with a smile', 'Kiss before you open', 'Open with love' e.t.c
- The writing paper had to be colorful, the normal foolscap was a thumbs down.
- The letter had to be scented... not too much not too little to be noticed, just perfect.
- At the bottom of every letter was a place for 'Dedics' ( special song for the lady/guy)
If your letter had this, you were officially in the game.
I think of the technological revolution as more of a curse than a blessing ( to a larger extent ) in fostering the pace of relationships, truly matters of the heart should not be rushed. The I-pod, I-pad, I-tunes, I- this , I- that... but I-need-my-letters-written. Love letters have some suspense, anticipation, eagerness carried in them, you cannot simply delete or resend a letter that fast. That means the time taken to come up with the massive makes the words more meaningful, carefully chosen.
In this era i feel like technology has completely rendered love letters obsolete! I am not discrediting its emergence
per se, i wouldn't also want to be stuck in stone age as the Flintstones communicating with drums, smoke and blowing of horns. When it comes to relationships, there is alot of information given out too fast and sometimes too soon. There is an overabundance of information that we may not be ready to process in such a fast pace.
In America, a study done shows that the American teenager sends out an average of 3,339 texts in a month ( that's 112 texts per day!). This my have detrimental effects on the kind of communication sent to and fro. The meaning of the words is cheapened! When you speed up communication you end up using more common expressions and cliche' phrases that are not unique and exclusive to one person. This is not a good way of expressing love. Some of the phrases are like : TTYL ( Talk to you later), Lol ( Laugh Out Loud) and many more. Since when do i make a joke and you send me a simple lol!!! Language has been completely distorted with acronyms that makes one sound charming and 'Swaggerful!'. Its like a me rolling on the floor fantasizing just because my new crush liked my photo on Facebook and tweeted me..... Wanna hang sometime. #lame.
Nowadays complete strangers can be an open book. Just Google their names or 'Facebook- Stalk them'.You can find out who has a top job and check out their profile pictures wondering who is that woman he has put his arms around! We don't keep time and we constantly lie on the phone, commonly... " I am almost there", when you are definitely not even out of the house! If only we would go back to when we were to meet at the clock at Kencom on Thursday at noon ( era of no cellphones)- then 'African time' would actually 'On time'.
May be I am being to skeptical and a bit harsh on technology, what I am simply saying is that, we need not dive into the newest form of technology head first (BBM), lets take time to know how it will affect our relationships in the long term. Its Wanja's nature to sometimes hang on to some old fashioned ways and be conservative. Lets just keep some tangible records of the 21st century metamorphosis of relationships to be able to look back into sometime in the future. Imagine if Paul in the Bible had written an Email to the Ephesians, and they had to delete it at some point to create more room for newer files... My point exactly!
