From the Publicized Phone Call to the Unanswered Text Message

A clip from the 1944 movie "Meet Me In St. Louis" started off with the authoritarian father, monarch of the household sternly announcing: "From now on I will take all incoming calls." He had barely finished the sentence when the phone rang, a few silent seconds passed until he finally gave her daughter Rose, who was already too eager to sit still, permission to pick up the phone. The rest of the clip unfolded exactly like a modern nightmare: the whole family staring at Rose as she shouted, in an attempt to improve the audibility of her voice, to Warren, her potential fiance on the other end of the line. However exaggerated the clip is, it accurately portrayed the reality of technology in the regular house hold in that particular time period: privacy was practically non-existent since each family only had one phone, typically emplaced on the wall of the dinning room.

So often we hear how technology has "changed" the way we interact; the proponents of this view, upon seeing this clip will most probably argue that the telephone enabled the communication between Rose and Warren and therefore catalyzed their relationship. But in reality, the relationship dynamics between not only Rose and Warren, but also among members of the Smith family--the authoritarian father, the submissive female members, the implicitness in Roses' signals to Warren while testing his willingness to marry her--are already-existent issues that, rather than enabled by the technology of telephone, are made visible by it. The way people interacted with each other affected the means which technologies were used.

Fast forward to the world we live in today--Aziz Ansari brilliantly joked about our obsession with texting. The prevalence of texting as a technology brought to view our tendency to suspend communication--from calling to texting, to facebook messages, to emails... for as long as we can. It is a problem in today's society caused by our changing socio-economic statuses among many other determinants, not just technology. What technology does is providing a new lens. By looking at how technology interacts with our family and romantic life, we can learn about the existent relationships.