Today I realized how cold technology can be, how devoid of human emotion and compassion it is. Technology is one medium through which we express our feelings. Cell phones, online chats, blogs, message boards, videos, online profiles, the list goes on. We can respond almost instantaneously to people half-way across the world... But does technology capture our feelings? Can it understand our deepest emotions? Surely we can use it to project our preferences, styles, criticisms, etc. We can use it to store whatever information we choose to express. But does it know who we are?

I'm currently going through a divorce and just today deleted my soon to be ex-wife's contact entry from the cell phone. Did my phone care at all? It just asked "Are you sure?" (Don't you wish every decision in life had a pop-up appear like this? Are you sure?). I chose "Yes" and another pop-up appeared "Entry erased". That's it. She's forever erased from my life as far as my cell phone is concerned. Doesn't my phone remember all the long, romantic conversations I had with her over the months? All the never-ending arguments we had? Doesn't my phone know how important a role it played in our long-distance relationship? Can't my phone check the call logs and see how often we talked to each other? Unfortunately the answer is a resounding NO.

As a society we are utilizing modern communication systems more and more to start, sustain, and end relationships with people. Sure social networking is great because it allows us to catch up with many people at once, in an efficient manner (the extreme version of this is Twitter). But technology doesn't care what we do, it doesn't know what we feel inside. Once something is deleted, its deleted. (For better or worse, we haven't figured out yet how to delete our feelings.)

So let's not rely on technology so much. Let's get in touch with each other personally, face-to-face. Let's express our emotions to each other as humans, as the social animals we are. Let's look each other in the eye. Let's smile, laugh, scream, shout, cry, celebrate, commiserate, in front of each other. Let's use all our five senses to be closer to each other. I want to express myself to everyone in the world, but I want them to see me, feel me, experience me, naturally... not through the glow of the monitor and low hum of the computer.