In the contemporary world of hyperconnection, conversations that request a face-to-face or rather a face-to-see, listening, attention to the other, to his expressions, become rare, likewise the tact that nurtured them. Often, in fact, they are broken by interlocutors still there physically, but who suddenly disappear after hearing a ringtone of their cell phone or in the addictive gesture of removing the latter from their pocket in the nagging quest for a message any that makes secondary the very real presence of their vis-à-vis.
They look at elsewhere and leave the interaction, abandoning their interlocutor there who remains with the swinging arms, wondering what to make this time of erasing the presence, this painful moment when it was extinguished by pressing the “break” touch of existence. The other in front of you has an ontologically thick than other virtuals, likely to send a message or call. He is figuration, immediately liquidated at the slightest suspicion of the possible arrival of an SMS.
Even family meal, formerly a high place of transmission and reunion, tends to disappear. Everyone arrives at their time and goes to the kitchen the dishes bought ready for the supermarket before abandoning themselves to their personal screen. In many families, the meal is a cordial assembly of zombies that eat a distracted mouth, little attentive to the taste of food, in indifference to the proximity of others, all absorbed by their cellular or their various screens.
Perpetual worship
We understand, in this sense, the success of fast foods in that their task is not to satisfy the taste, but the only need to eat in all indifference, since it is first the eyes that feed on the screen. Restaurants refer the same image of men or women who, after brief minutes of mutual congratulations, quickly disappear behind their laptop. They are around the same table, but alone, the captive eyes of their screen, in oblivion of what they eat and the fact that they are supposed to be with friends or colleagues. The conversation is in the process of disappearance, archaic vestige of a bygone time.
Communication, on the other hand, saturates everyday life and devours all attention, it implies virtuality, distance, decorporation, efficiency, speed, usefulness. It is impatient, speed, reflex and not reflexivity. It juxtaposes the actors and it most often resembles the transfer of press releases. Conversely, the conversation requests availability, attention to the other, an exchange, a stroll, an interiority, the value of silence and the face, the uncertainty of the path. It is a mutual consecration, but it requires that the invisible thread which connects the individuals involved does not break.
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