Non-communicative Communications

@Amulet

It is to catch up with a competition. There is a company in Florida that already has a social media platform with end to end encryption already. They have divided their platform into personal and professional so that the same platform can host both personal and professional contacts. They do revenue share with users when someone buys something inside the platform. If Facebook doesn't catch up and compete well, they will have a run for the money from other upcoming social media platforms.

 

I consider some people whom I have never set eyes on as members of my family.

Thankfully, this is still a tradition in Casa Amica. It takes a bit of effort, but I'm happy to say everyone here makes that effort.

I like snail mail and will occasionally pen a long letter to an old friend. I prefer phone calls to texting. And have never been guilty of "forwarding." I may well be a dinosaur.

When she first got a phone, my grandmother used to kwetch because people merely phoned each other instead of visiting in person. She predicted dire consequences for humanity.

I hear change is good for us, Satchi. But we don't have to like it, eh?

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The Kanzi clip was intriguing to associate the voiceover with the face-to-face interaction. (Oh, she was the one I spoke on phone.)

Born to Lorel and Bosandjo at Yerkes field station at Emory University and moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University, shortly after birth Kanzi was stolen and adopted by a more dominant female, Matata.

As an infant, Kanzi accompanied Matata to sessions where Matata was taught language through keyboard lexigrams, but showed little interest in the lessons. It was a great surprise to researchers then when one day, while Matata was away, Kanzi began competently using the lexigrams, becoming not only the first observed ape to have learned aspects of language naturalistically rather than through direct training, but also the first observed bonobo to appear to use some elements of language at all. Within a short time, Kanzi had mastered the ten words that researchers had been struggling to teach his adoptive mother, and he has since learned more than two hundred more.

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Kanzi, thus, was a passive learner, who learnt indirectly in sessions meant for Matata just because he happened to accompany his adoptive mother. He still was a lexigram native (born into the innovation) unlike his mother (the older ape) who was trained into the same environment.

I have often observed similar inclination in human innovation where 'digital natives' (born in the generation) are instinctual of their environment whereas the 'digital adults' transition or adopt innovation. That technological innovation could lead further to a social invention too ..like ..withdrawal in dining etiquette preoccupied with gadgets. The grey in my family often rue the social depletion ...kids always gadget gadget ...but would the fledglings like Kanzi in his childhood, who never acquired the sensation of social naturality since natal acquaintance ever identify any remiss. (It has always been this way -- according to them).

My nephew listens to our pre-internet tales with amusement. Amusing, though irrelevant to his growth. He values his sensations (fidgeting and punching metal) more fulfilling over stray anecdotes in playground of his aunt. A dinner table conversation with physical eye contact might be endearing to our generation from nostalgia though superfluous to someone who had derived the same pleasure in other forms of immersion (reading a tablet while eating).

I, too, often mull the standard of living out of nostalgia: seen that then, seen this now, that is lost!. But each forwarding generation in their own up-shifts holds on to the decaying charm. The intrusive technology could be wedging to the transitioning generation but upholding to this native generation. What playgrounds, convivial dinner, idle time was to the previous generation ...spotify and snapchat are to this evolved generation. Is the pleasure and fulfillment the same? I want to believe somewhere that it is.

There's a cute picture on the internet of Kanzi and his sister Panbanisha learning Yerkish and 'articulatory equivalent of the symbols'.

Savage-Rumbaugh has observed Kanzi in communication to his sister. In this experiment, Kanzi was kept in a separate room of the Great Ape Project and shown some yogurt. Kanzi made some vocalizations which his sister could hear; his sister, Panbanisha, who could not see the yogurt, then pointed to the lexigram for yogurt, suggesting those vocalizations may have meaning.

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I don't know how Matata, the mother of both from earlier, would have felt on their kith's subversion to learn human indulgence. Why yogurt? Why learn how to communicate yogurt? Is such measured communication of yogurt robbing them of their natural tics to growl, rub their tummy and signal insects? Kanzi and Panbanisha might also have loved yogurt too much to lapse on their natural diet and beckoning.

I know that your post isn't slagging automation (in communication and behavior and etiquette); it is also not glorying nostalgia of human intensity in communication.

I know that Kanzi was passingly cited as a pick-up line in your original post but I found him too cute to have made a spiritual successor in the fitting inquiry: 'when I think of the fact that we humans have stopped talking to people around us'.

Just loss of favorable associations from one's childhood.

That civic diminution is replaced with a hatke, not inferior nor unsustainable, but mutating, sensation in this generation. Is the pleasure and fulfillment the same from non-communicative immersion fiddling with networked toys? I want to believe somewhere that it is for the next generation.

 

I didn't intend to overlook this implication in your original post on fractured sense of belonging in inter-generational or even cross-generational interaction. (I was very hmm about it in my brainbox.)

Whilst teenyboppers and workaholic adults are fixated in their texting, how could an elderly presence cut through that preoccupation without imposing oneself on them. I don't know how it is supposed to resolve.

Usually, the foregoing generation of their times grudgingly bears the brunt, straddling the times they have cherished and the times they are eking out in. Should they bear the brunt? Idealistic to hem together a clasped family with social values that benefit everyone. Hope members within a family are not insensitive to such isolation endured by the rest, but given the self-contained identities we have evolved into, quite a challenge to level it off with mutual interests. (I was very hmm about it in my brainbox, I understand you, but what can be done.)