Text written by Laura Kirchhof and originally posted on the old Dose Extra website.
With the evolution of social media, information spreads very quickly nowadays. The process of globalization together with capitalism, made communication vehicles accessible to most of the population and what seemed impossible, with technology and the expansion of the internet, became reality. Today we live in a fully connected world. The news arrives all the time, we shop through virtual stores and we can relate to people on the other side of the world, but what seemed to be just a big step for humanity, brought with it a series of problems.
In her book “Informing Is Not Communicating”, Dominique Wolton states that this excess of information, instead of improving communication, is causing what he called “ incommunication”, which causes hatred and misunderstanding of certain individuals. According to the title of this literary work, information is not synonymous with communication, information can be considered as the message to be sent and communication is much more complex than that, to communicate is to live and negotiate.
In the past, we used the term “mass communication” to describe the process of media that reached a large audience, however, this term no longer matches reality. Message recipients are more active and refuse to accept certain news or concepts, it is not a homogeneous “mass”, on the contrary, it is increasingly heterogeneous. Due mainly to the virtual world and social networks, a series of opinions based on guesswork, without the proper depth of the subject, circulate daily in our daily lives. They lead to the dissemination of often false and prejudiced messages that, when shared, lead to the incommunication of the reader who does not agree with such absurdities.
In addition, with the ease of communicating through social networks, human beings are losing face-to-face contact, eye-to-eye conversation. Of course, this technological advance has facilitated our relationships and undoubtedly brought many people closer, but we cannot limit ourselves to that. Communication is not only in the messages, as has been said, it is in the relationship with the other, in the coexistence that does not necessarily have to be physical, it is in the words, in the intonation, in the gestures and even in the silence.
It would be hypocritical to say that life would be better without the internet or social networks, after all I am a user of both and I am posting my text in a virtual environment, but it is balance is needed. We don’t need to be always connected to be considered modern, we also need to maintain the essence of communication, which is to maintain this dialogue with those who are by our side.