A group of people huddle together in the corner of the school breezeway, and immediately you think about how nice they have it: a group of close friends, mingling and laughing together before hitting the books all day. As you walk closer, you notice they are all looking down- at their cell phones.

Cell phones are a modern innovation, yet one with which the teenage crowd has already
mastered. From the iPhone to Blackberry models, QWERTY keyboards and compact, sleek designs, these devices are the dream of privileged youth, and ironically, the doom to human-to-human communication.

One might ask how that can even be possible when it has become so simple to contact not just one person, or ten, or even hundreds for that matter, but a limitless amount of people with the touch of a button, virtually anywhere in the world. Communication technology has skyrocketed, yet the small comforts of human interaction-not through an electronic device- are staunchly overlooked.

Is it rude when people text instead of calling because they don’t want to be stuck in a 30-minute conversation? When immersed in homework or other time-consuming activities, many, myself included, take the easy way out. However, when did it become acceptable to text a break-up? To have a conversation for hours on end, by a string of text messages? Would you say “It’s so nice to hear from you,” when you should really be saying, “It’s so nice to read from you”? So much is lost in translation, the joy of human interaction stripped away by the convenience of a text message.

People fail to take advantage of the fact that we can talk to people face to face and have a
conversation. Even with awkward or strange mannerisms and facial expressions, it is these moments that are memorable and can characterize a person. I would much rather remember a friend by their booming, obnoxious laugh than by the fact that they always wrote “tomorrow” as “2moro” in a text message. Sometimes it is just nice to hear the inflections of a person’s voice and see a person’s reactions, and to restrain from reading yet another halfhearted “LOL.”