We live in a time period in which everyone wants answers to any and every question they might have instantaneously. What happened to hand written letters, being patient, and waiting for the other person to write you a letter back? If you really needed to know something rather quickly, you picked up the land line and called their house, but even then, if the person wasn’t at home you had to leave a voice mail and wait for them to call you back. Technology has made our lives easier, however it has also made things very impersonal. Just think about how technology made it easy to get in touch with family, friends, and people all over the world through email, instant messaging, Skype, and social media. Technology has both helped and hindered us. It makes things easier for us to find things and make plans but it also has hindered us because we are losing our interpersonal skills.
Each new generation of parents tend to think that it faces it owns challenges. We suppose every generation feels like they are on an adventure for the first time exploring and foreign terrain because, well, as parents they all are. When children get in trouble in this generation, parents take away their technology instead of grounding them from seeing their friends or making them do more chores around the house. In the end, this only ends up hurting the children because they then don’t know how to do basic household things when they have to live on their own or with roommates away from mom and dad.
Communication is huge for anyone, including our kids. Technology is now the most important communication tool for organizations. Email, texting, Facebook and Twitter are just a few examples of mediums that have diminished verbal communication. Group chats are the new normal for trying to make plans with friends and roommates rather than leaving a note for your roommates to read when they get home about how you want to do something fun and that you have ideas and you guys will all talk about the ideas that you have for a roommate bonding night when everyone is home. Instead of calling your friends and having to try and get everyone on the same page through phone calls everyone is just added to a group chat and makes plans for a friends’ night out that way.
We need to at least sometimes talk face to face or, call someone, or write them a handwritten letter instead of making plans through all of our smart devices that everyone so easily has access to now. We need to remember to work on our interpersonal skills because while it is nice to be able to easily make plans almost instantaneously. However, in the workforce when we all get there you have meetings that you have to attend and interact with people and you don’t want to come across as though you don’t know how to talk to people or like you are anti-social. You may also have conference calls that you need to be in on and if all you ever do is text people how are you going to know how to talk on the phone to your boss and sound professional.
The generation that is currently entering the professional workforce has lived most of its life with the internet and instant messaging. This generation is going to be the one that either changes the workforce almost totally over to almost all technology based work instead of meetings and talking to people faces to face to get a group for a project all on the same page. This is starting to become a crisis because people are starting to become addicted to their devices. If interpersonal skills don’t continue to be taught to people we may have to totally rethink how the world works.
