(This is the Online column, written for The Southland Times)
As much as the technology has made the world more accessible, it’s also made us as people a whole lot less interactive.
It used to be that we would occasionally put pen to paper and write a letter, or pick up a phone so we could converse with spoken words.
Now, everyone seems to be texting in that awful abbreviated language that I refuse to adopt: get a rare text from me and words will be spelled in full, it will be properly punctuated and will even have apostrophes if required.
Do I feel old? Yes, sometimes I do, but I don’t care about that. I care about having the ability to string words together in a form that wouldn’t make my late mother (a proof-reader by trade) cringe.
Even emailing seems to have fallen out of favour, with online messaging taking over – if we’re not texting we’re bombarding one another with tweets, wall posts and IMs.
Most of the emails I receive these days are spam, work-related, from delightful Nigerian people offering me incredible investment opportunities, or about my Trade Me habit. Seymour the Wonder Cat managed to email my work email account from my Gmail account last week but that was purely by chance as he decided to walk across my computer keyboard.
On the very rare occasion that someone I know and actually want to hear from sends me an email it’s generally a forward of some joke that’s doing the rounds. They might as well address it “to the householder”.
The snail mail situation is even worse: it’s all bills or junk mail. Oh, sorry, I tell a lie. The lovely people at Contact Energy sent me a wee letter this week to tell me they were increasing the price of my electricity. Thanks guys, it’s nice to know you care.
Maybe I should write them a letter explaining that I’d like to reduce my electricity payments?