Earlier today my girlfriend and I got into an argument over where we were going to spend the evening: her place or mine. It was convenient to go to her place because she wanted to meal prep and wanted to get her shopping for the week out of the way. I was fine with that, and was entertaining myself with a game of League of Legends as the process seemed to be taking a while.
During the game (a ranked game which I lost) the plans changed. She informed me that planning out the shopping in a way that made sense was tedious and that she'd worry about it tomorrow. And this is where the miscommunication occurred.
I was too busy playing my game to hear what she thought the implications of this interaction were: that we'd just pick up something and stay at mine. She didn't communicate explicitly what she meant. And all of this was exacerbated by the fact that I was playing a game during the initial communication and she was browsing her phone during the disagreement (we'll be nice and not call it an argument) afterward.
That got me thinking.
We live in what we like to call the Information Age. But information is only valuable if there are at least two parties that can interact with it. Even if that party consists of one person, it almost always consists of two different versions of that person separated by time and circumstances.
In other words, we may say Information Age but what we mean is Communication Age. And in this Communication Age full of distractions, intermediaries, rumors, and filters (on top of the ones we as humans already have) is it not true that as we become more and more connected tangentially to others far away are we not becoming more distant from those close to us?
While I was playing my game I was communicating with my teammates via pings, emoticons, and text. During our conversation my girlfriend was communicating with others via text or being communicated to via articles and recipes. The argument was small so we got past it pretty quickly, but one could see how this might be much worse over big issues in a longer relationship with people who live together.
Tonight, as we cuddle up and watch some random movie on one of various platforms, sharing the magic of that experience as the modern era has brought it to us, I think a small part of me will wonder at the value of spending time together using technology as our platform even right next to one another.
Maybe it's time we all considered that.