Dear Director Feltri,
dialogue is being replaced by a tendency to be misanthropic. Sigmund Freud in his writings developed the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis: verbal language is one of the most important aspects of our life, it allows us to express ourselves, communicate and interact with others, as well as being one of the fundamental traits that differentiates us from animals. Therefore, studying it could help us understand much more about man, his primitive history and modern languages. Precisely for this reason, the study of the origin of language is considered a multidisciplinary undertaking that involves, among others, linguists, primatologists and neuroscientists. But perhaps today it is of little interest. There were many others who preceded Freud and neuroscientists. They were doctors, scientists and intellectuals, philosophers like Socrates and Plato. Before they invented interactive languages with smartphones, we communicated with our mouths and we were very keen to do so. Not anymore. It’s all mechanical chatting, leaning our heads on tiny computers. We don’t realize it anymore, but we are becoming misanthropes.
Adalberto de’ Bartolomeis
Monselice (Padua)
Dear Adalberto,
technology has not led us to lose or put aside verbal, written and spoken language, since, in fact, we communicate continuously through messages, videos, posts, emails, phone calls, video calls and so on. Technological development has actually made interactions easier and faster, whereas once we relied on the carrier pigeon, which however did not always reach its destination.
What we have lost is nonverbal communication, that type of communication that includes facial expressions, glances, that is, eye contact, gestures, physical contact, in short, that process of exchanging information that goes beyond semantic language and is even more effective than the latter. This loss has affected as well as impoverished our way of relating and transmitting thoughts, emotions, sensations, needs. From here, a heated conflict that is spreading everywhere, within families and even outside.
I am truly convinced that conflicts arise precisely from the absence of communication or from a short circuit of it. We end up not understanding each other and then we go to the clash. Our relationship with the other is always filtered by the screen of a PC or a cell phone. It happens to me, when I am on the street, to notice that people walk looking at the display of the smartphone, with a dazed expression, sometimes even putting at risk their own safety and that of others. We no longer look each other in the eye. So how can we expect to really know each other, to understand each other, to love each other? If we then consider that communication has always been composed mainly of non-verbal language, we grasp how harmful our habituation to the new mechanisms and means of communication is, which annihilate all those elements that are part of the non-verbal code.
What to do? How to get out of this dead end? All we can do is cure the habit of constantly handling our smartphones until they become a sort of extension of ourselves, without which we feel lost, damaged, amputated of a vital part. It is not an easy task. On the contrary. We are now drugged. In short, we all suffer a bit from an addiction to certain gadgets and certain devilries that, instead of simplifying our lives, sometimes seem to complicate them. And who among us hasn’t thought this at some point?
We are slaves to apps, tablets, cell phones. They were made for man and man ended up being made for them, having given up his humanity to marry the spirit of this new millennium, in which sex is virtual, dates are online, meetings are done via Skype or something like that, we break up via text message, we meet on chats at this time, a new millennium in which love stories last as long as an Instagram story, which I think lasts 24 hours at most, and in which, instead of sharing moments together, we share posts on Facebook.
There is no room for emotions, but we have emoticons, or smileys, which are only useful for closing boring or uncomfortable conversations or
to evade questions and requests.
To connect with the other it is essential to disconnect from the network, put down the cell phone, lift our gaze, notice what is in front of us. At least before losing it forever.