Dear Ann

A letter to an 19th century woman about social media and how we communicate in this day and age.

Dear Ann,

The future is confusing. It’s a weird time here in 2014. To explain how we communicate in today’s world I should first briefly and unscientifically explain what the Internet is. For very layman terms the Internet is like a telegraph, but with pictures, videos (moving pictures), words (text, now a form a quick interactions of words), and drawings. The speed at which information transverses between people is with in milliseconds, less than ONE SECOND and the information transfers from one person to the next. It is incredible. People have handheld devices (like an itty bitty telegraph with a screen) that we call cell phones (a cellular phone, no wires, connection/cords to another device is needed). Between these devices people have applications to quickly share whatever they feel like with one another to communicate whatever they want. For things that people talk about with their friends now compared to what you probably talk about would be considered completely unimportant and miniscule to your world. That’s the beauty of fast communication though. We can communicate easily and quickly enough with one another that we have the luxury of gossip, sharing stupid things, and just blabbing about whatever we want, because we can make the assumption that the important information has already made it to the other person.

There are two applications (apps) on cell phones that use photographs more frequently than others. These apps are called: Snapchat, and Instagram. I won’t fully get into what they are as to not overwhelm or confuse you too much. I will tell you a bit about them though, Snapchat allows the user to take a photo or video of whatever they want (most commonly people take pictures of themselves making an ugly face. Personally, I use it to share hundreds of photos of my dog because she’s awesome). When they send it to their friends they have the option to allow them to view it for a maximum of ten seconds. After the ten seconds have completed, the picture disappears forever! Instagram is different because when you take a photo you then upload it to this app and save it to an online (internet) database that is personalized to you. We call this a profile. A person’s profile is created and managed by the individuals themselves. If one chooses they can have their profile set-up to only allow people of their choosing to be able to see it, or you can have it set for anyone to see it. Most of these people you don’t even know in person and might never even meet in person.

There are many other apps and websites (internet pages) that you can experience that show movies, plays, videos, music, photographs, and many other things. There are MILLIONS of websites. The Internet has an infinite amount of space. It’s something that you need to experience and see to fully understand.

Now, I know you’re wondering if this world is lonely or not.  Remember when I said this world is confusing? Well if the concept of the Internet isn’t already confusing enough, here’s some more information to really rally you. The Internet brings people closer together in the sense of information and maintaining contact with one another, so it’s not lonely in that way. However, you can be alone physically. For instance, when you write a letter to someone you might be alone while you’re writing it and the receiver might be alone while they are reading it, but the letter itself is bringing you two together. Some people have created whole worlds online and only interact with others via Internet communication. For some people this may be a really lonely life. For me, that would be an incredibly lonely life to have. Never physically being with someone or seeing people face-to-face and talking in person. I find it hard to have friends whose voices I’ve never even heard. So I will leave it up to you to decide if this is a lonely world or not.

Some words that may be helpful for you to learn in communicating in this world are:

·      OMG: this stands for “oh my god (or gosh)” and is used as a term of exasperation.

·      Dope: With an older crowd of people (40+, yes people live to be much much older than that now) this means drugs. With a younger person this means cool (cool means interesting, neat; or can be a low temperature).

·      LOL: Laugh out loud. Because people don’t communicate in person, rather through the transferring of words on a screen, they need to let the other person know that they are laughing at what they said. Many people just find whatever they said to be funny and are rarely actually laughing out loud.

Then there are things we call “emojis” these are faces that we create with the use of punctuation (tip: tilt your head to the side while looking at them). Some examples are as follows:

·      :) this is a smiling face.

·      :( this is a sad face.

·      :D is a very happy face (mouth open).

·      :p a face with it’s tongue sticking out.

·      XD extremely happy face. You are smiling so hard that your eyes are shut.

I hope this was helpful. If not just let your imagination run wild!

Best regards,

Mattie K.