The first.
No matter what the medium and how fast and new and convenient (add any number of other incentives), it seems that the onus of keeping communication alive can still remain as one-sided as it did in the day of snail mail. I suppose I should have learnt my lesson by now. But the eternal optimist in me (or perhaps, it is the love of writing in me?) persists. As a child, I took to the concept of 'Penpals' on Young Times (a supplement of Khaleej Times) instantly. Unfortunately, my pals' responses went from excited to tepid to none at all. My parents reasoned that clearly this was a lot of work to undertake for the sake of complete strangers. They had a point.
So, I tried again with best friends. As I had many opportunities to experiment with this variant of penpals, what with moving schools, apartments, cities and countries (with the last one, I was hopeful of adding to my other agenda of collecting stamps ;)), I figured this model was guaranteed a greater degree of success. I would studiously compile addresses before each move and set aside generous portions of my pocket money for stationery and stamps right after, and promptly send my friends a letter with my new address. Ironically, with this second model, the responses started directly from tepid and rapidly progressed to none at all. On occasion I would receive letters written by the respective mothers. Sigh.
As luck would have it, from time to time our worlds would collide again. And what had been painfully buried as a failed experiment would be dug out again, by a careless comment, such as "I used to love getting your letters. And then you moved." I would think to myself, at least they loved it. Oh well.
And then email arrived. I don't think I need to elaborate on the response rate with this new experiment. :)
The second.
Social networking sites have created a new layer of awareness. What was blissfully ignored is now dangled blatantly in your face. For instance, in years past, I could be completely unaware that a friend was in town at the same time as I was, but chose to call upon another/other friend/s forgetting me altogether. Now, I cannot. What's curious though, is a good number of these kind folks are the ones to have taken the initiative to search you up and add you as a 'friend' in the first place, leaving you with the challenge of trying to figure out if the person now sporting uber-starightened hair, a new-happily-married-last name, and an interesting online avatar is the same person you saw everyday in school a decade ago; posing the dilemma of whether or not to post birthday wishes on his/her wall; and the familiar response to your 'How are you? It's nice to connect after so long'.
Someday in the not so distant future, we might be able to surround ourselves with the virtual clones of everyone in our social network. I wonder what the communication experiment will result in then. A babel of noises? Or, perhaps, a shattering silence. Only time can tell. I do know that I will continue to write...and sing :)
