The Frustration of Immediacy

As communications become more instant, people become less reliable.  Says me.  I'm sure this is not true in areas like stock trading or medicine where it has been a great boon, where people's fortunes or lives are dependent.  But in the general public, among the hoi-poloi, it is something else.  After college, I didn't have a phone or a television for ten years.  "Jesus Christ," kids will say to me, "how'd you get in touch with anyone?"  I don't remember having any problem, but that may have been colored by my expectations.  I would see someone, we'd agree to meet at a time and place, and that was that.  Now, it seems, people are free to text you fifteen minutes before a meeting to tell you they can't make it.  Electronic communications endlessly frustrate me.

My problem (and it is my problem) is that I wasn't raised on reality television shows.  There, frustration is a major tactic.  Undermining expectations.  If you want to win, it seems to me from the little bits of shows I have seen, you must keep the others on edge.  Trust is a weapon.  And we know the values on T.V. become world values.  Trust and expectation are truly dangerous things.

But I've not meant to opine here today this much with trivial bitches and petty disappointments.  Rather, I wanted to comment on the loneliness that such immediacy creates.  Rather, the frustration of such.  Message, message, message. . . nothing.  What does that do to the psyche?  What happens when your twitters aren't commented on or your Facebook postings are ignored?  Those questions are bound to be answered by graduate student studies going on around the world today.  Rich territory there.

Isolation, loneliness, and the frailty of human existence are major themes for me.  Figures in great, lonely landscapes, people isolated in metropolis, a frail body alone in the bathroom, a mirror and a tub.  Now, I think, I must include the iPhone in the pantheon of iconic symbols of nothingness and the void.  I dream paintings by Hopper, a melancholy figure staring into a 26" computer screen, one hand on the mouse, shoulders fallen, head down.  Darkness and the universal light.